#47 - Having a 'local foreigner' for yourself

Plus: does convenience kill commitment?

Hi friends! 👋👋

Welcome to Issue #47 of Curiosity > Certainty!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been recording short videos of myself on topics that’ve got me thinking. The video-making process has been illuminating in many ways. For example, very quickly I realized that on camera, I had to let go of my late-night DJ rendition and exude energy. Substack doesn’t allow videos yet, and hopefully that’ll change soon. What I’ve done here is shared the transcript of one of my videos.

Let’s jump right in.

Do you have a ‘local foreigner’ in your life?

I want to tell you about something that you understand but underestimate the value of in making your life better. And it’s not just you. I’m the same. That something is the idea of a ‘local foreigner’. 

Who’s a local foreigner? There are three conditions for someone to be a local foreigner. Two are obvious, the third one is hidden. 

Local and foreigner are straightforward. I live in Mumbai where daily wage laborers and cooks tend to be outsiders who have come to and settled in their place of work far away from home. So are cabbies and beauticians. On the surface, there’s little difference between both sets of workers but that’s not true. Cabbies and beauticians have high exposure to locals and that hones their ability to pick out peculiarities of life in a strange place much better than others. And that’s the hidden quality of a genuine local foreigner. 

Why is the perspective of a local foreigner important? Imagine you’ve been at an organization for a few years. You’re well settled. Along the way, you’ve constructed this  map in your head about what is real. You can’t see it any other way.

Now think of a new hire who joins your team. She has come from outside. She’s a part of this new setup that she’s not yet embedded in. She’s a foreigner looking to bed herself in a new system. Being at the fringes allows her to see things in a way you cannot. It’s easier for her to notice what’s odd. Imbalances in a team, inconsistencies in practice, quirks in culture–all these stand out to her. She’s not part of the cult. She’s not beholden, yet. She is best placed to call out the BS. And that’s what makes her insight so valuable.

We could all do with a local foreigner for ourselves. Their purpose should be to hold a mirror to us, to challenge our thinking, to call out our BS. Not to demean us but to help us see reality better. This could be someone who knows us but is not obligated to us except to tell it like it is. Such a person could take the shape of a mentor or a sparring partner. Their sharpness would be in their bluntness. Their kindness would be in sparing us the niceness.

Do you have a local foreigner in your life?

Convenience and commitment

When it first came out, Google’s autosuggest feature delighted its users. It bordered on magic. Today it is par for the course. We expect the search box to read our mind. 

And not just Google, we expect to be pampered wherever we go, whatever we do: GPS tracking, 1-click payment, single sign-on, same-day delivery. 

It means that no one has to set standards for convenience. It happens automatically. We peg our expectations to the most friction-less experience. 

What happens when convenience is no longer a luxury? What does it do to commitment? 

In a recent episode of The Knowledge Project podcast, Shane Parrish recounts his conversation with a cardiac surgeon who talks about how minimally invasive heart surgery has pulled down the percentage of patients who commit to long-term lifestyle changes. Not having their chests cracked open seems to make patients take a less serious view of the issue.

Romance is another area of high commitment. It’s hard to court someone on the weekends and forget about them through the week. Esther Perel, leading couples psychotherapist, calls romance anything that goes beyond the bare minimum. It’s just that the bare minimum is in free fall.

For the boomers, dialing your sweetheart’s number for hours on end was dating tax. Millennials switched to the cellphone. Zoomers have switched to texting. 

Neither romance nor heart surgery used to be known for their convenience. But now they are. What’s going on here?

Commitment creates meaning. Convenience creates opportunities. I don’t know if one is more important than the other, though I do think that’s the wrong framing of the problem. In certain situations, for certain purposes, convenience frees us to pursue more important things. Commitment to long-term goals makes life fulfilling. Commitment to past decisions that no longer align with our goals leads to sunk costs. 

It is beside the point to ask if you’re living a life of convenience or commitment. Both are needed. Knowing what is important to you matters. You could hustle through a courtship but where would that leave you? You could treat heart surgery as just a blip on the radar and avoid taking stock of your life but is that what you need?

Three practices to become a better decision-maker

Here are three simple practices to get you started on the path to better decisions. I’ve distilled them from a wonderful interview of neuroscientist and author Lisa Barrett on The Knowledge Project podcast.

Before I lay out the behaviors, here’s a quick reframing. 

How we see things: Good decision-making is all about deciding well in the moment.

Reframing: Good decision-making is about making a bunch of smart decisions before, by way of practising certain behaviors, such that you improve the likelihood of good outcomes after. 

Practice 1: Better lifestyle design automatically leads to better decisions.

Your pre-bedtime snack craving plays out like this: You’re ready for bed but you feel peckish and the fridge just happens to be on the way to the bed.

What do you do? You can try harder like millions before you and end up with a tub of ice-cream at midnight OR you can stack up your fridge with healthy snack options. You win even when you lose.

Practice 2: Extend lifestyle design to things you would normally not think of as relevant.

What’s that one area that has an outsized influence on your life but one that you leave to chance because you think it’s just completely out of your control? Love, maybe? We’ve all been fed stuff about listening to our heart, about someone out there for us. 

But your heart can only choose from what you show it. It only sees the options you present it with. You hang at a music festival, you’re more likely to find a certain type; you go to a poetry reading, you’ll find another type; you go for a hackathon you’re likely to meet someone else. Context matters. And you’re in charge of it. So don’t throw your hands up in the air and say, Love is an emotion and I can’t control whom I fall in love with. Because you can and should control whom you spend time with.

Practice 3: Practice perspective-taking. 

Why is perspective-taking so much harder for some than it is for others? Because those who’re good at it also happen to practice it a lot. If you think about perspective-taking as a skill, you’ll feel the need to practice it beforehand and get better at it. If you think about it as a talent you’ve just been born with, you’ll believe that you can unfurl it at the exact moment of need. 

But that rarely happens. When you’re upset, you tend to put yourself in the center of your universe. No one else matters. So if you don’t make the effort during moments of calm to see the world through another set of eyes, don’t expect to be able to do so when someone cuts us off in an argument. 

Better lifestyle design, better company, perspective-taking–these are three simple things to get you started on the path to better decision-making. 

What are some practices that help you make better decisions?

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! 🙏

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Until next week…