Tag: personal growth

  • The expectancy vs surprise continuum: music, art, suicide, and the good life

    A rule of thumb about how to live a good life and what makes good content. There’s a thread that connects sounds in nature, music, suicide and what makes a good film: the expectancy vs surprise continuum. Understanding or at least being aware of this continuum can help us see life through a different lens…

  • Maslow’s Theory of Motivation: the five steps to Nirvana

    Maslow’s Theory of Motivation: the five steps to Nirvana

    Everyone has seen some version of this pyramid. But what exactly does it do? American psychologist Abraham Maslow created his hierarchy of needs to explain what motivates certain behaviours. His theory was that once you’ve largely satisfied one need, it no longer motivates you. The next need in the hierarchy becomes the main motivation, and…

  • Dunning-Kruger: Novices Don’t Know How Much They Don’t Know

    This is the model that explains why after two hours into an edX Python course you’re stuffing a backpack, searching for motels in central Menlo Park and muttering gibberish to your cat about s3 buckets and a world-beating app that’s the Uber of dentistry. Still, on the flipside, the model offers solace when you know…

  • Learn to learn better in 3 steps

    With three, brutalist green triangles because they’re memorable.

  • Always Be Learning

    It’s more a credo to live by rather than a mental model, but I’ve categorized it as a mental model. Sue me. A central tenet in Ray Dalio’s Principles and beloved by Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Elon Musk and other highly successful investors and businesspeople, Always Be Learning – or ABL – is about how…