Becoming Aware of Your Biases and Blind Spots

Hey readers 👋

I spent a long weekend in my favourite city on this planet - Paris 🇫🇷. I love the vibe I get when I’m in Paris, the Parisian style and the food is also something I cherish. I absolutely adore this city. Paris - I will be back again soon…

While in Paris, I mentally put together this week’s topic. It’s a topic I very often talk about, but with a slight twist.

Many of my regular readers will be aware that I often talk about the dangers of social media and how it confirms our pre-existing biases.

To put a little spin on this, we have biases in the way we process and store information we’re consuming from more formal/traditional environments.

Say you’re at a lecture, a seminar or a conference, we’re loaded with far too much information within a short space of time, for our brains to be able to process effectively. Instead, we have a filter (bias) that help’s us sort through this information.

When we hear something, we like the sound of, we mentally retain this information (some may even write it down). When we recall the information we’ve mentally stored away or reread the notes we’ve written, we’re further confirming our biases.

However, information that doesn’t already align with our train of thought is instantly discarded, or not seen as information worthy of being retained. This is how biases work.

In short, we choose to believe what we want and drop what we don’t like the sound of. This is where our blind spots come from - we aren’t always aware of other perspectives/possibilities.

We need to become aware of our biases and our blind spots, to be able to grow and achieve our full potential. We must actively seek out and encourage being challenged by those who have different viewpoints to us - diversity of thought. This ensures we broaden our horizons and it helps us become better aware of our biases, along with uncovering those tricky blind spots.

Hope you have an awesome week ahead 🤩

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3 Things I've Enjoyed This Week

1. The Truth About CEO Tenure - An interesting article on HBR summarising research which concluded that it takes a CEO about 15 years on the job before they start to evidence remarkable results. Some boards fire their CEO far too early - although admittedly, some and on to theirs for way too long.
2. Wealth is what you don’t spend - Just like people justify eating unhealthy food after exercise, we justify spending more after earning more. This means, despite earning more, we’re no wealthier than when earning less.
3. 17 Simple Daily Habits That Separate High Achievers From Everyone Else - simple tips being shared by these high-achievers that helps them manage their hectic days/life, giving them a slight edge over everyone else.

Tweet of the Week

This Week's Wisdom

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

- Mark Manson, in the book: The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck

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I also share interesting articles, book quotes, and the occasional speech or TED talk to help us all get smarter, wiser, and live better.

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