Mistakes

Somebody forwarded me this "tiny-teensy" list of mistakes to avoid!! Is sharing this online a mistake as well??

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Mistakes

1. Jump to conclusions about other people’s motives.
2. Get caught up in competition. Strive for cooperation.
3. Describe yourself in negative terms.
4. Compare yourself to others to try and validate your results.
5. Violate your personal values or ethics for any reason.
6. Make excuses for telling lies. Just be honest and tactful.
7. Be rude to others regardless of how you feel about them.
8. Invalidate other people’s feelings.
9. Disrespect yourself or others.
10. Forget to be grateful.
11. Talk down to people.
12. Expect the worst or project negative expectations.
13. Speak in blanket generalizations.
14. Dominate conversations.
15. Try to assign blame. It doesn’t matter who’s at fault.
16. Focus on lack.
17. Put yourself or other people down.
18. Indulge in “pity parties.”
19. Think of yourself as smarter than, or better than everyone else.
20. Keep eating just because it tastes good.
21. Always insist on having the last word.
22. Look for other peoples faults. You don’t want them looking for yours.
23. Snivel.
24. Allow negative thoughts to dominate your outlook.
25. Imagine yourself as sick, poor, unworthy, or worthless.
26. Entertain or dwell on inappropriate thoughts or actions.
27. Harbor grudges or think about getting even.
28. Make lame excuses, just take responsibility.
29. Waste time trying to win an argument.
30. Say “I can’t” because you choose not to.
31. Expect TV to make you smarter.
32. Forget to take action every day.
33. Ignore the needs of others.
34. Say yes when you really mean no.
35. Dehumanize members of the opposite sex.
36. Over commit your time, energy, or resources.
37. Allow what you “have to do” to erase what you “want to do.”
38. Let the media or popular opinion make your decisions for you.
39. Buy things you don’t need just because they’re cool.
40. Forget to smile often and sincerely.
41. Stress over things you can’t control or change.
42. Let work dominate your days off.
43. Imagine you will do it someday. Do it now.
44. Expect others to make you feel happy, satisfied, or loved.
45. Tell yourself there isn’t enough time for a healthy lifestyle.
46. Blame your genetics for bad lifestyle choices.
47. Get trapped spending your free time doing things you don’t like.
48. Make decisions because you’re afraid you might miss out on something.
49. Worry over the personal decisions of others.
50. Focus on or talk about problems.
51. Get involved in things that are none of your business.
52. Avoid eye contact.
53. Say “I told you so” when things go bad because your advice was ignored.
54. Follow fads, trends, or allow others to dictate your identity.
55. Pretend that your reality is someone else’s fault.
56. Invent distractions to avoid responsibilities.
57. Shy away from new experiences.
58. Pretend you know something when you don’t.
59. Be afraid or embarrassed to ask for help.
60. Forget to show appreciation to others.61. Allow your analytical mind to invalidate your intuition.
62. Ignore that little voice in your head.
63. Be too proud to learn from children
64. Worry about social standing, prestige, or popular opinion.
65. Talk yourself out of pursuing your dreams.
66. Think that ignoring a problem will make it go away.
67. Try to convince yourself that the things on this list don’t matter.

In hindsight - 2

Heuristics and biases is a fairly vast topic and there are a plethora of cognitive biases that determine our behavior. What is interesting is that this individual biases can aggregate and manifest itself as a collective organizational behavior.

I came across a brilliant presentation from Deloitte that spoke about the impact of these different biases in organizations. The speaker called it human biases and gave great examples of how these biases adversely impact risk strategy execution. The image below shows the different kinds of biases that exist and threaten change management programs in organizations. So true! It's a great representation of all the challenges we see in organizations day in and day out!

Source: Deloitte DBriefs

In hindsight

Remember orkut? I don't think the millennial's or the generation Z's would know about it. Orkut used to be the social networking site by google before the days of facebook. I used to be quite active on orkut about a decade ago.

In my Orkut profile - about me section, I remember writing about the character of Howard Roark the protagonist of the epic novel Fountain head. Ayn Rand, the author describes Howard Roark as a highly self-aware and highly rational individual. He knew himself very well and had rational reasons for why he liked somebody, hated somebody, what he wanted in life, what he wanted in a relationship and what to say and when to say some thing. In fact, the other characters in the book were also pretty strong headed, highly mature, rational and aware characters. Like every body else who has read the book, I too was heavily influenced by the characters, the story and the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Obviously, different people remember different things about the book and take away different things back into their lives. My world view and my needs at that point led me to admire the self-awareness of the characters which I believe eventually led me to chase "perfection". So, in my Orkut profile I had written some thing on the lines of experience - and I had written about not doing things right and giving it the name "experience"! And I wondered when will I get to the stage in life when I stop excusing myself by saying, okay I got it wrong this time and put it to down to a "learning from experience". In other words, for a long long time I was chasing the "be-perfect" dream. And I always pushed myself to get there.

Guess what? Turns out that there is a scientific explanation to this... and it is called "Hindsight bias"! Hindsight bias is an after the event rationalization where you get to the end of an event and tell yourself that you knew all the way along that the event was predictable. When you get to the end of the situation, you regret not noticing trends earlier and not adjusting your behavior accordingly. This belief that you could have foreseen the event is based on the premise that the world around is rational and behaves in predictable order. In a way, this core belief was driving me towards achieving the level of my heroes - the Howards Roark's and the the Dominique Frankon's of Fountain head.

And of course, the world is not as predictable as you believe it is and I never got to the level of my fictional heroes! I only wish I knew this earlier. I wish I had stopped to reflect and learned about this earlier. In hindsight, I wish I was a lot wiser :)