Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Here's Why You Should Read "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

Episode Date: February 2, 2018

Every month or so I like to read a book that I hope will just make me a little smarter. Well, this is one of the better “make me smarter” books that I’ve read in a long time. It’s chock-full of simple but profound psychological, behavioral, and economic insights that will make you a better thinker and decision maker and help you avoid some of the more common cognitive pitfalls that lead people astray in their lives, and the arguments and examples presented in the book are exceptionally clear and orderly, which gives you a firsthand look at how a brilliant mind works—an ideal to strive toward in your own reasoning and analysis. This book is also a good read for anyone interested in becoming a better marketer, because great marketing ideas ultimately come from a deep understanding of human psychology and persuasion, from creative translations of observations about how people think and behave into commercial applications. One of the things that most struck me while reading this book is just how easily we can be manipulated—and just how much of our personalities and lives can run on automatic—if we don’t make a conscious effort to at least consider zigging when something in us really wants to zag. This is particularly relevant in today’s political and social climates. The propaganda machines of every side of every debate are in overdrive, and are more sophisticated than ever, but they still rely for their power on the exploitation of many of the thinking traps and cognitive biases discussed in this book. Simply reading about these inborn deficiencies doesn’t necessarily cure us of them, but hey, maybe they’ll help us see through some of the daily dose of demagoguery and agitprop. Anyway, the bottom line is if you like to learn about what goes on behind the curtains of our minds and how it influences our attitudes, emotions, choices, and behaviors, then this book is for you. Want to be notified when my next book recommendation goes live? Hop on my email list and you’ll get each new installment delivered directly to your inbox. Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. fosters optimistic overconfidence. read and what my favorite books are and so forth. And as an avid reader, I am always happy to oblige and get some book recommendations in return as well. I also just like to encourage people to read as much as possible because I think that knowledge benefits you much like compound interest benefits your bank account in that the more you learn, the more you know, and the more you know, the more you can do, and the more you know, and the more you know, the more you can do,

and the more you can do, the more opportunities you have to succeed. And on the flip side, I also believe that there is little hope for people who aren't perpetual learners. I know that might sound a little bit pessimistic or cynical to you, but let's face it, life is overwhelmingly complex and chaotic. And if we look around, we can find plenty of evidence that it simply suffocates and devours the lazy and ignorant. So if you are a bookworm and you're on the lookout for good reads, or if you'd like to just get into the habit of reading more, then this book club is for you. The idea is very simple. Every week, I'm going to share a book that I've particularly

liked and I'm going to tell you why I liked it and give you several of my key takeaways from it. I'm also going to keep these episodes short and sweet so you can quickly decide whether or not a book is likely to be up your alley or not. Okay, so let's get to this week's book, which is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who is a Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Now, every month or so, I like to read a book that I hope will just make me a little smarter. And this book is one of the better make me smarter books that I've read in a long time because it is chock full of simple, but very profound psychological behavioral and economic insights that will not only make you a better thinker and decision maker, but also help you

avoid some of the more common cognitive pitfalls that lead many people astray in their lives. I also really appreciated just how clearly and orderly the arguments and examples were presented in this book because it really gives you a firsthand look at how a brilliant mind works. It gives you an ideal to strive toward in your own reasoning and analysis, and hopefully a little bit of benefit by association. Hopefully through osmosis, you get at least a little bit better at thinking just by spending a few hundred pages in a really smart person's shoes. This book is also a good read for anybody that is interested in becoming a better marketer because great marketing ideas ultimately come from a deep

understanding of human psychology and persuasion. They come from creative translations of true observations about how people think and how they behave into commercial applications. And one of the things that most struck me while reading this book is just how easily we can be manipulated, just how much of our personalities and our lives can run on automatic if we don't make a conscious effort to at least consider zigging when something in us really wants to zag. I found this particularly relevant because of today's political and social climates. The propaganda machines of every side of every debate are in overdrive these days and are more sophisticated than ever, but they all still rely for their power

on the exploitation of many of the thinking traps and cognitive biases that are discussed in this book. Now, simply reading about these things, these inborn deficiencies that we all have, doesn't necessarily cure us of them, of course, but hey, who knows? Maybe they'll help us see through at least some of the daily dose of demagoguery and agitprop that we're all exposed to. Anyway, the bottom line here is if you like to learn about what goes on behind the curtains of our minds and how it influences our attitudes and emotions and choices and behaviors, then this book is for you. All right, so let's get to my takeaways. First takeaway, quote, reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction. If you were primed to think

of old age, you would tend to act old and acting old or reinforce the thought of old age. And my note here is that consciously controlling your thoughts and your self-talk, I think is one of the easiest and also one of the most powerful ways to control your attitudes, your feelings, your behaviors, and even your capacity for mental and physical performance. For examples, studies show that positive self-talk can increase our motivation and our willingness to endure uncomfortable situations. So if you tell yourself that a situation that you are facing now or are about to face soon is or is going to be awful and unbearable, it probably will be, And a lot more than it needs to be.

Because if you, on the other hand, tell yourself that while it may be painful and while it may be uncomfortable, that you're separate to the pain and you're separate to the discomfort and that you're going to be okay and that it's going to be okay and that it will pass, that is going to help you fight through it and ultimately experience less pain and discomfort. Okay, takeaway number two, quote, this is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know

into a coherent pattern. And my note here is that this passage and really the whole discussion that I pulled it from helps explain why some people can be so confident about things that they know so little about and why the most ignorant people are often the most certain of their positions and their beliefs. So take government and politics again, for example. So these days it is trendy to have an opinion on everything. And just about everyone has a number of hardline opinions on all manner of things, ranging from Trump to the electoral process, to immigration, social welfare, and so forth. And I've spoken with many people about these things and have

often been amazed at how simultaneously certain and ignorant some people are of what is and what should be. And if you want to see this for yourself, the next time somebody says that we are now under fascist rule, literally Hitler, ask the person to just define the word fascism. Let's start there. Just define the word and wait for the burbling because chances are they're going to say something like, It's like Nazis and Hitler and stuff. And then if you want some bonus babbling, ask them what democracy and republic mean. It's like governing by the people for the people. Everybody knows that. Oh, so you don't like the electoral college. Okay. So what is the electoral college? How does it

work? It doesn't matter because it's racist. The next time anyone has anything bad to say or even good to say, anything to say at all about the economy, for example, ask them to define the word economics and quickly explain how the economic machine works. And then of course, wait for the crickets. Now, of course, I've done this many times myself and it doesn't even frustrate me. It actually just makes me kind of sad. It's discouraging to see how worked up people can get about vast, complex phenomena when they actually don't have any idea what they're talking about. They don't even understand the meaning of the topics being discussed, let alone the intricacies involved. I really think that the country would be better

off if a large portion of its citizenry just stopped caring about politics because they're not going to actually inform themselves. They only go by their feelings. And we would just be much better off if they turned their rage to other things, to the things they actually care about, that they actually spend their time on, like porn and video games and social media and Netflix. Go get worked up over that stuff. They know more about that stuff than government. So it's for their own good. Okay. Enough political ranting. I'll save this for another time, another place, maybe another podcast. Sal from Mind Pump texts me at least three times a week that we need to start

a political podcast. And a part of me wants to, but a part of me also is already trying to keep so many plates spinning as it is that that's the last thing I need is another big plate to try to put up in the air. Anyway, takeaway number three, quote, the effect heuristic is an instance of substitution in which the answer to an easy question, how do I feel about it, serves as an answer to a much harder question, what do I think about it? The emotional tail wags the rational dog. The effect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the

real world, of course, we often face painful trade-offs between benefits and costs. His work offers a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Citizen that is far from flattering, guided by emotion rather than reason, easily swayed by trivial details, and inadequately sensitive to differences between low and negatively low probabilities. So my note here is that I try to avoid binary thinking as much as possible in my life and especially in situations where the stakes are high in situations that matter because it's basically never true that someone or something is wholly right or wrong or good or evil or one thing or its opposite. And if we want to make the best possible analyses and decisions, we have to be able to understand and weigh the nuances of situations. And we have to be able to demonstrate why someone or something is more

right than wrong or vice versa, or even mostly right or wrong. Okay. Takeaway number four, quote, Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best case scenarios. And that could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases. And my note here is Daniel says in this book that most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. And I wholeheartedly agree with that observation and think it applies just as much to me as anybody else. And that's one of the things I actually try

to avoid in my own planning. And one of the ways that I do that is I do something known in the business world as a post-mortem analysis before I get started on a plan. And what this involves is simply imagining that your plan and that your initiative, whatever you're trying to do, has completely backfired and failed, and then reflecting on how. Why did it all fall apart? What specifically went awry? Were there just fatal flaws from the start or did other unforeseen factors bring it down? This is a great exercise to do because if nothing else, it will help you highlight the most obvious ways that your plans can fail and the most obvious mistakes that you can make, which then of course you can incorporate into your planning accordingly to maybe shore up

flaws or deficiencies and avoid making the big obvious mistakes. For example, my team and I have big plans for Legion this year. We plan on growing at least 40% over last year, growing our revenue 40%. And we laid out our plan, me, Jeremy, Kareem, already everybody that is going to play a key role in that, put together our best plan that we could put together, and then did a post-mortem on it. And one of the most obvious ways that this plan can fail is if we fail to succeed in our paid advertising in particular. If that underperforms, we will not hit our revenue goal, period, unless we get a gift from the heavens, unless there's just an amazing windfall that would probably have to come from the publicity sphere. So I was on the Kelly and Ryan show, the Live with Kelly and Ryan show, for example. That

was my first national TV show that I've done and it was great. So let's say that all of a sudden now I got booked for a string of shows like that if I was on Good Morning America and then The View and something like that might be able to make up for it, but you don't want to count on that. So what we did then is shift things around in our planning to really put a lot of attention and a lot of emphasis and a lot of focus on paid advertising in particular right away. So that is like number one on Jeremy's list and really probably number one on my legion list is we need to do everything we can right now to figure out how we can create highly profitable paid advertising campaigns that can scale. That's the key. We need campaigns that can go big. So anyways, that's just an example of how I like to

use the post-mortem analysis. Okay, the fifth and final takeaway, quote, the tendency to revise the history of one's beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion. Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound, but by whether its outcome was good or bad. And my note here is anyone that has played sports, at least semi-competitively, knows that judging yourself by how well you executed the mechanics of playing the game is more fruitful than judging yourself by the outcomes of individual practices and individual games. Because the better you are at the processes, the better you execute at that level,

the more good outcomes you will naturally experience. And I think the same is very true of life as well. If you want more good outcomes in life, then you'll want to make sure that you are making more good decisions and taking more good actions. Decisions and actions that are good on their own merits. Now, does that mean that every outcome is going to be good even when the decisions and actions are optimal? Of course not. You can never completely eliminate chance and risk and you can rest easy knowing that the occasional bad outcomes that you will experience are due more to just bad luck than anything else and that the law of large numbers will reward you over the long term. Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that decisions and actions were sound simply because an outcome was good because in reality, the

decisions and actions that were made and taken may have been horribly misguided and extremely likely to fail, but they didn't because dumb luck. It's important to know that because when you are faced with a similar situation or a similar problem in the future and think that because it worked last time, it'll probably work again, you are asking for trouble. on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new

goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you

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