#56 - Multiple personality superpower and being memorable

Plus: The unbearable heaviness of getting things right the first time

Hello, dear readers! Welcome to issue #56 of Curiosity > Certainty, my weekly download of thoughts on how to think better! 👏

This week we explore strategies that allow us to experiment before taking the plunge on anything consequential and irreversible. We also look at a curious dichotomy between how we experience things and how we remember them—something that colors our memory without us knowing. And finally, we learn to get out of our own shoes and into those of others by assuming their perspective. So onward then…

Multiple personality superpower

You’ve a single personality problem. 

• You can’t shake off your biases.

• You can’t see your blind spots.

• You can’t take perspectives.

In short, you’re trapped inside your head. This is true 24/7/365.

There’s a way out. It needs you to turn on a superpower. It’s called the multiple personality superpower. 

Good news: We all have it. 

Bad news: Few of us know. 

Hack: It involves a bit of copying. 

Outcome: Better decisions.

Unlocking MPS allows you to: 

• Assume different personalities

• Look through their lenses

• Light up your blind spots 

You can’t beat your biases. But you can by assuming personalities throw light on your blind spots. Take any business problem. 

An engineer will think of cause and effect; 

a marketer, incentives and behavior; 

a designer, customer experience; 

a CFO, unit economics. 

MPS helps you look at the problem through all their eyes. It shows you a multi-dimensional view. Now the odds of you making a better choice are higher.

You don’t have enough time in one lifetime to learn everything from scratch. The best have already done the work. Leverage their thinking. That’s your superpower. 

So how do you turn it on? 

• Learn the basics of other disciplines. 

• Find experts in them. Talk to them if they’re colleagues or mentors. Study them if they’re business leaders. Read their interviews. Devour (auto)biographies. Understand how they think.

• Then look at the problem through their lens. 

• Ask: What would my mentor do? Or what would Elon do? What would Jeff do?

• The world you now see as someone else has fewer blind spots. More connections.

Until now you’ve now approached a problem with a hammer. Use a swiss knife instead. Think like the best. Turn on your multiple personality superpower.

The unbearable heaviness of getting things right the first time

As a knowledge worker, you don’t have the luxury of a practice mode. Athletes and artists get to perfect their craft in the dark but you’re always in live mode. 

-No dress rehearsals.

-No mistakes.

-Just get it right the first time.

If you hear yourself lamenting ‘Ideally I would like to test out various options before taking a big decision, but we all know that practically this is not possible’ or ‘Most decisions in my work have no scope for experimentation. It puts a huge amount of pressure’...

You’re not alone. 

But there’s a way to get off this hamster wheel. You can:

-Give yourself options.

-Run simulations. 

-Pre-test ideas.

-Be less anxious.

Here are three strategies I have learned from Farnam Street and the book Decisive to try out options before picking the best.

Avoid the worst outcome first: During a particularly busy time in my life, I was desperate for a break. I squeezed into one rainy weekend a road trip with a 12-hour drive each way. Three hours in, I had totaled my new car and was stranded on the highway. To get to smart, you’ve to cross stupid. Invert the problem. Ask yourself: What’s the worst outcome? Then take steps to avoid it. 

First bullets then cannonballs: This is a strategy made famous by Jim Collins. He advises running low-cost low-risk experiments that tell you what’s the best use for your limited resources (men, money, market). Chip and Dan Heath call it multitracking–considering multiple options at once. Multitracking has built-in fallback options (if not Plan A, then Plan B or C). 

💡Tip: Most understand the value of pre-testing ideas but miss out on the ‘at once’ bit. They run one test at a time and grow impatient, or worry about cost. Do the opposite.

Attain distance before committing: You may encounter fear and worry most acutely with ‘people’ decisions (fire, hire, move). That’s when it helps to sleep over your decision, even for just a day. Because once you’ve decided, you start seeing things through the filter of your decision. Waiting before announcing allows you time to see the world through that filter. 

If you think this is hard to pull off, you’re probably right. Here’s another tip.

💡You think it’s hard because you’re comparing the output to a level of perfection you have for most things you do. You need not. You need not be world-class at executing these strategies. You can be mediocre and still enjoy outsized benefits. Why? Because very few try these. Even being a little good is enough to take you through. Then as you practice and get more comfortable your self-belief takes off.

How to be memorable

We have two masters: pleasure and pain. This is not new information.

What may be new is that how we remember our masters is not exactly how they treat us. Our remembering self has a different take on what has happened compared to our experiencing self. 

When judging an experience (how painful or pleasurable) we tend to average out how we felt at its most intense point (most painful or pleasurable) and at its end. The duration of the experience doesn’t matter either (duration neglect). This is called the peak-end effect.

What does it mean for you?

👉If you’re a product manager, design an experience such that your customer is delighted at the end. 

👉If you’re a manager who has to show tough love to a reportee, end positively. My friend and communication coach Akshat Srivastava suggests you follow a commendation-recommendation-commendation format.

👉If you’re a dentist, end your root canal session with a tub of ice-cream in the patient’s favorite flavor.

👉If you are calling guests over for dinner tonight, make sure the dessert is perfect. You can go wrong with any of the other courses and it won’t matter as much. 

What we experience and what we remember of it are two different things. 

💡Insight: Worth pointing out to those who champion living in the moment that the objective quality of what you go through moment by moment is not what you judge the overall experience by. Your memory is weighted disproportionately by the spiky moments, nasty or nice. That’s why living in the moment feels better afterward, not in the moment.

Is it just a coincidence that even before science bore out this truth, we’ve had expressions like

‘Left with a bitter taste’

‘Ended on a sad note’

‘All’s well that ends well’

And that’s why do not mess up the dessert when having guests over.

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