Dr Grace Lordan

THINK BIG
Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want
 WRITE-ON PAGES

Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version.

Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.

 Contents

Chapter 1: Begin
Chapter 2: Goal
Chapter 3: Time
Chapter 4: Inside
Chapter 5: Outside
Chapter 6: Environment
Chapter 7: Resilience
Chapter 8: Journey
Get in touch

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
 About the Author

Dr Grace Lordan is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative (TII),

Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science and an Associate Professor in
Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics. An economist by
background, her research is focused on understanding why some
individuals succeed in life and others don’t. She is an expert on the effects
of unconscious bias, discrimination and technology changes. Grace is an
expert advisor to the UK government, sitting on their skills and productivity
board. Her academic writings have been published in top international
journals in economics and the broader social sciences. This is her first book.
 Think Big
‘Insights from Behavioural Science are being used around the globe for a
variety of purposes but never, until now, for career building – something
Grace Lordan does systematically, eloquently and instructively in Think
Big’ Robert Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

‘This is a rare self-help book that’s actually informed by evidence. Drawing

on her knowledge of behavioural economics and psychology, Grace Lordan
shares a host of perceptive, practical tips for getting out of your own way
and making progress towards your career goals’ Adam Grant, New York
Times bestselling author of Think Again and Originals, and host of the TED
podcast WorkLife

‘Want to advance your career fast without compromising personal

happiness? Think Big can help. It provides a handy, science-driven
framework to career-building that can fit around even the busiest person’s
daily life’ Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of The
Catalyst

‘On your journey to thinking big – about yourself and about the world –
Grace Lordan is a wise and winning guide. She’s written the ultimate
primer on enlisting modest changes to achieve monumental goals’ Daniel
H. Pink, author of When, Drive and To Sell is Human

‘Dr Grace Lordan has created one of the most important books anyone can
read to help their working life. Anchored with behavioural science she
shows how all of us can move towards our ambitions while fighting back
worries and self-doubts’ Bruce Daisley, author of The Joy of Work

‘In this must-read book, Grace equips you with the know-how required to
take your career to the next level. This book will not only inspire you to
think bigger, but to take immediate action in turning those dreams of yours
 into reality. When you think big and start taking small, consistent steps
forward each day, anything becomes possible!’ Simon Alexander Ong

‘If you know it’s time to aim higher in your career, Think Big provides a
clear and compelling behavioural science toolkit to help you realize your
goals and replace your current reality with something bigger, better and
more enjoyable’ Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You and teacher in the
executive education faculty, Duke University Fuqua School of Business

‘Engaging, practical and insightful. Reading Think Big is like having a

savvy performance coach sat inside your head, helping correct your path
towards the career you really want’ Graham Allcott, founder of Think
Productive
Dedicated to my mum, Rita.
Love always – Grace.
 CHAP T E R 1

Begin

It’s not hard to picture someone who isn’t enjoying their job …
Imagine Katie. Katie left university, where she’d studied history, and
entered a graduate training programme at a big advertising company. She
showed a particular adeptness at marketing, and at the end of her placement
she was offered a full-time position. Katie seemed to thrive in this role. At
the time, social media marketing was in the ascendency, and Katie quickly
grasped how she could make it work for her clients – mainly large food
companies. A few big coups followed: a prizewinning campaign here, a
new client there, and she was promoted. Then she was promoted again. Her
twenties were flying by, and Katie seemed to be flying, too. Now, at thirty-
five, Katie is in charge of a global team that delivers online marketing
solutions to some of the world’s biggest food production companies. She is
well-liked by her colleagues, has an amazing salary, and is the envy of her
social circle.
But Katie hates her job. Like many others, she fell into her profession.
Katie feels she should be having the time of her life, but she’s totally
miserable. Something has to change. But what?
Katie represents those who on the surface seem to have it all figured out,
but really yearn for something different. Katie could do with disrupting her
work life and thinking bigger.
And Katie isn’t the only type of person that needs to think bigger …
Imagine Reyansh, who dropped out of university. He always intended to
go back but never did, and instead bounced around a few different jobs in
the service industry. He’s been a barman and a waiter, but has found a niche
as a barista. For the last couple of years he’s been working in a coffee shop,
and since joining, the coffee shop’s fiercely loyal clientele has steadily
grown. Reyansh makes a decent cup of coffee, but that’s not why the coffee
shop is doing so well. The reason people come back is because of Reyansh.
He’s funny, he’s charming, and sometimes – because it’s sunny, or he likes
your coat – he gives you free coffee. (Though the owner cheerfully berates
him for this.) Reyansh isn’t the quickest barista on the books – he’s usually
too busy chatting – and there is supposed to be a loyalty card scheme to
administer freebies. But everybody can see that Reyansh adds inordinate
value to the business. He’s a great shift supervisor, he’s brilliant at teaching
trainees, and even the crankiest, most difficult customers leave the shop
smiling.
But Reyansh isn’t satisfied. Being a barista is fine, but it was always
intended as a stop gap. For one thing, the pay isn’t great. For another, while
making coffee and hanging out with people is fun, he craves something
deeper and more meaningful from his work.
Reyansh personifies people that fail to launch within the specific time
period society expects of them. It can be daunting to launch later than your
peers, particularly when you don’t have a clear idea of what your passion is.
Reyansh could do with thinking bigger, bringing his future self forward and
identifying a more satisfying career pathway.
And Reyansh isn’t the only type of person who needs to reimagine where
their career is going …
Imagine Juan, who is working happily in an investment bank. He likes
his work and his colleagues, and is perfectly fine with the 50+ hour working
week. Juan now manages a team of ten people, and takes great effort to
bring them along. He is a mid-level manager. Over the last five years he has
seen members of his team advance within the organization relatively
quickly, two of whom have been promoted over him. Juan genuinely wishes
them well, but he cannot understand why his own progress has stalled. He is
growing disillusioned but keeps smiling on the outside.
Juan is a good example of people who plateau despite craving
advancement. He could do with rethinking how he approaches the next few
years of his career, so he can move beyond his plateau.
So Katie is miserable, Reyansh has failed to launch and Juan has
plateaued. Perhaps you picked up this book because you’re facing a similar
problem.
Maybe you know where you want to be in your career, but you don’t
know how to get there. Maybe you don’t even know that – you simply
know that you aren’t where you’re supposed to be right now. Or maybe you
feel as though you know where you want to go, and know, on paper, how to
get there, but somebody else is preventing you from doing it – a bad boss,
say, or an unhelpful colleague.
Fear not.

This book is going to help you take small steps to build the
career you want, and it’s going to show you how to do that
using insights from behavioural science.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, behavioural science seeks to

understand why people make the choices they do, and also identifies easy
tweaks that we can make to our environment to get different outcomes.
Behavioural science can help explain why people stumble in their career
journeys. It can also help explain why some aren’t entering the race in the
first place, and why others drop out at the first sight of failure. Behavioural
science teaches us that we should think big and set a goal for our future. It
also teaches us that by taking regular small steps today that support this big
thinking, we can get to where we want to go.
As a professor of behavioural science at the London School of
Economics, whether I am teaching masters’ and executive-level students or
giving talks to industry, I always want one fact to land: the research I do
into human behaviour helps explain why an outcome they want is not
materializing.
I’m going to do the same in this book. I will explain why the outcome
you’ve been working towards might not have materialized yet, and I’ll also
show you how to overcome these obstacles. I will blend my own original
insights with research from the frontiers of behavioural science, and draw
on lessons from the fields of economics, psychology and management to
empower you to build the career you want. While I have changed the names
and other identifying information of the people whose stories I tell in this
book, the substance of their experiences is real. You may even see yourself
in some of them.
Perhaps you are starting a business, or closing a business. Perhaps you
are starting university, or thinking of dropping out. Maybe you are vying for
a promotion, or wishing for a lateral move across divisions in your
company. You could be one of the many people who are uninspired by their
working lives and in need of change.
 Regardless what role, industry or stage of career you are in, I guarantee
you’ll find valuable lessons in these pages that will help you think big about
your future and visualize a big-thinking goal. To help you achieve this goal,
the book will also focus on identifying the regular small steps you will take
to achieve your ambitions. And just as important are the behavioural
science insights that will help you stick to taking these small steps, and to
circumvent or navigate around biases and other obstacles that get in your
way on your big-thinking journey.

HOW I ENDED UP WHERE I AM TODAY

In December 2011, I moved to the LSE as a lecturer. I was full of
enthusiasm, excitement and expectation. About six months into my new
role, I had a conversation with a professor in my external network who I
really admired and respected. As we discussed the next steps in my career,
he told me that it would take at least five years to become a senior lecturer,
and that even that trajectory was highly unlikely.
I was devastated to hear it would take me that long. I felt like a deflated
balloon. If I were a cartoon drawing, there would have been a black cloud
hanging over my head. After the shock of the news, I internalized the
feedback from Professor Negativity and hit a plateau. I even started going
backwards. My enthusiasm for my research waned; I couldn’t work
productively. I dwelled on how mediocre I was compared to others.
The professor’s comments became a self-fulfilling prophecy. A
prediction like this, from a respected source, causes itself to become true –
because whoever is impacted by the prediction believes it, and changes
their behaviour accordingly. In this case, a supposed mentor’s beliefs about
my abilities negatively affected my performance as I lived down to their
expectations.
But this professor did not know me well. Actually, he did not know me at
all.
That realization came to me in the middle of one sleepless night, like a
slap in the face. Professor Negativity had created a narrative about me
which was false. Like a fairy tale, it was based on archetypes. These
archetypes were constructed from inaccurate social norms about people like
‘Grace’. People can confuse my relaxed demeanour for the attitude of
somebody who doesn’t take their career seriously. Or perhaps my admission
that I found it difficult to finish projects had caused him to label me as
someone who would never finish a project. Equally, women in economics
are still a rare breed in academia, and even rarer still as you advance
through the ranks. Maybe my unusual path to academia – with no stop at an
Ivy League institution on the way – meant he assigned a lower probability
to me ever being successful. Who knows?
One thing I realized that night was that he was wrong. I was also certain
that his narrative about me had been constructed because of the professor’s
own cognitive biases and blind spots.
But what could I do?
One simple change I could make right then and there was to get a
different mentor. So I did just that. In fact, I found three. I listened carefully
to what they all had to say. This process was really important, as I truly
believe in listening to feedback. I also believe that if everyone says you are
dead, you should lie down. If, for instance, they had all told me the same
thing as Professor Negativity – that I would be very unlikely to make senior
lecturer within five years – it would have been wise to listen, and up my
game. But they didn’t. In fact, none of Professor Negativity’s sentiments
were repeated. Ever.
So what happened five years later? Well, I had already been promoted to
associate professor (which is a higher grade than senior lecturer), and was
writing a CV that would see me promoted to professor. I had far surpassed
my expectations: I had my dream job, with a clear progression path. I also
avoided Professor Negativity at conferences.
Perhaps more importantly, though, I was happier. I didn’t have that black
cloud over my head. But things would have been very different if I had
continued to internalize the first feedback I heard as a hard reality. Things
would have been different if I hadn’t navigated around that obstacle.
I was lucky. At the time, I was conducting research about precisely these
kinds of obstacles. I used myself as a laboratory as I furthered my
understanding of the study of human behaviour. I was becoming a
behavioural scientist.
These days, you can find me in Connaught House at the London School
of Economics, where I am an associate professor of behavioural science,
well on my way to becoming a professor. I am a director of the new MSc in
Behavioural Science, and also the director and founder of The Inclusion
Initiative at the LSE. My research seeks to understand why people choose
the jobs they do, and why some people have more success than others in
getting to where they want to go. My findings demonstrate clearly that
while some factors on our career journey are not within our control, a lot of
others are. This has led me to advise many business leaders, helping them
find ways to level the playing field for their employees, to ensure they are
rewarded based on ability, skills and talent alone.
This book, though, looks at the problem from the other way around. It is
about empowering individuals to think bigger, and enabling them to build
the career they want through taking regular small steps.

WHAT HOLDS US BACK?

While having big dreams is easy, making them happen is hard. Navigating
working life today is tricky, and the skills we need are always changing.
Advances in technology and increasing globalization are shaping the type
of work that is available at a pace. More of us find ourselves working in
winner-takes-all arenas. From the traditional workplace to the modern-day
start-up, the people who are perceived to be the best at what they do get
extraordinary rewards, while those who rank just a quarter percentile point
below them get rewards that are much more ordinary.
It can feel exhausting if you are striving to get to a specific finishing line.
It can be even worse if you are working really hard but have no direction or
end goal in mind. Many of us sacrifice self-care in the quest for success. We
miss family events, health check-ups, forget special occasions and more. If
we are putting our well-being and happiness at risk, surely we should be
rewarded according to our impact, skills, abilities and talent? Otherwise the
risks we are taking don’t have fair pay-offs.
So we put in the effort and enhance our skills. These newly acquired
skills produce something amazing: breakthrough research, an innovative
strategy, or a product that everyone will be better off from having. We are
then rewarded in kind. Right?
Unfortunately, the process which determines who gets what reward and
why is not exact, and is often unfair. Great new products fail daily, real
talent goes unnoticed, and valuable innovations are cast aside. Cognitive
biases are often the reason why our ideas falter and careers stall. These
biases have likely impacted you and your career over and over and over
again. They may even be so blatant they bring you to tears when you notice
them. It is frustrating when people who can influence your career
progression reveal blind spots that make the journey longer and – even
worse – less enjoyable. You may grow disheartened when narratives of ‘this
is how we do things around here’ stand in the way of your innovative ideas,
or you have to waste time in endless discussions driven by bureaucracy, red
tape and lobbying. You may find yourself getting grumpy when you witness
biases hindering the career progression of extraordinary and intelligent
people in your own workplace just because they didn’t go to one of the top
schools, aren’t part of the right networks or don’t have the right look.
But it’s not just about other people – the influence of cognitive bias is not
isolated to the actions (or inactions) of others. Our own cognitive biases
hold us back, too.
You may consider yourself a good decision-maker. You always put
thought into the choices that you make. You don’t allow emotions to rule
your head. You’re pretty logical, right?
Wrong.
Behavioural science has proven beyond doubt that, most of the time, our
decision-making is badly hampered by cognitive biases and blind spots,
regardless of how good we think we have been in our deliberations. We
often hold a belief that we are acting purposefully when we aren’t. We
aren’t as rational as we think.
How can our own cognitive biases hold us back at work? Well, for those
of you who are working for a large company, ask yourself why you aren’t
going for a promotion next year. Is it because you haven’t fulfilled the
requirements, or (as is the case most of the time) are the promotion criteria
unclear and you want to make sure that you more than exceed them?
Take a step back. What is the rational decision?
If I am rational, I want to get the benefits of a promotion as soon as I can.
I want the extra income, the status, and the proverbial monkey off my back.
In the case of criteria being unclear, then shouldn’t I go for promotion even
earlier? I should take a chance, right?
But maybe I’m placing too much weight on the cost of being rejected
instead.
If this applies to you, a cognitive bias is holding you back. You are
overestimating the costs of getting turned down (the rejection, the pain, the
embarrassment and so on) and underestimating the benefits of potentially
being successful.
 For most of us, the anticipation of rejection is so bad that we don’t put
our hat in the ring as often as we should. We anticipate the rejection as
being too awful to even consider facing it. However, the actual experience
of the rejection is not as bad as we anticipate. And there are silver linings,
too. For me, rejection tends to involve a good glass of red wine and some
chocolate to accompany the pep talk I give myself before trying again. Most
importantly, we learn a lot from trying and failing. It is a life experience, in
and of itself.
Let me use another example. Do you hate your current job and dream
about setting up a business? Maybe you have a cool product idea, but you
break out in a cold sweat when thinking about not having a regular pay
cheque for the foreseeable future. So you carry on with your long commute,
and worry vaguely that your true calling is passing you by.
Is this rational? Are you looking at the decision as all or nothing? Are
you underestimating the cost of regret? Are you taking into account the
costs of ‘what if?’ when you are eighty years old and haven’t followed your
dreams?
Our own cognitive biases hold us back. In fact, for most of us, this is the
main problem. If I am truly self-reflective, I would put the ratio at 80 (me):
20 (others). I have stuck with projects far too long after I should have
binned them. This makes me a victim of the sunk cost fallacy, which is the
tendency to continue only because of previously invested resources. I have
also grossly underestimated how long it will take me to do some of the most
basic tasks, falling victim to the planning fallacy, which rears its head
when we believe our pursuits will always follow the best-case scenario. At
various phases in my career I have felt like an imposter when putting
myself forward, despite having the credentials and the experience to make
me a pretty solid bet. It is telling that even those that are aware of imposter
syndrome fall into its trap. I have also procrastinated for endless periods
(including when writing this book), to avoid feeling the pinch of failure or
rejection.
To recognize that we are part of the cause of a prolonged career journey
that stumbles, stalls, reverses and even edges near a cliff for periods of time
is actually quite freeing. The acknowledgement of the possibility that our
own biases hold us back allows us to be proactive. Looking at the above
ratio, I can take control of 80 per cent of those cognitive biases. Doing so
will have a huge impact on how my career progresses. And this is true for
you, too – albeit your ratios may be different.
From today, I want you to take control of your career journey, and use
behavioural science insights to help you identify and pursue a new big-
thinking goal, or to get across the finish line and realize a long-term dream.

WHEN WILL I GET THERE?

When we think big, it can be tempting to put an exact deadline for
completion on our new journey. I want you to avoid doing that. Everyone’s
journey is going to be a function of a combination of talent, effort and luck.
You can put in effort and hone talent, but you cannot control luck. What I
am certain of is that you are going to go on a career-transformation journey,
and it is going to take years.
Yes, that’s right … years!
For some of you it will be two years, for others five years … and if you
are aiming to be the leader of a country, the CEO of a big company or
create the next path-breaking product, it may even be ten.
But don’t panic! There is plenty to enjoy along the way. You will not be
waiting years to realize gains. In fact, I am certain you will experience
growth almost straight away. Like a road trip from New York to San
Francisco, there are key milestones, moments when you just enjoy the view,
and lots of fun, exciting experiences to be had en route.

The point of a road trip isn’t simply to arrive somewhere else;

the journey itself is rewarding, too.

Equally, there will be times in your career journey when you get a flat
tyre or hit roads where there is nothing worth seeing. You may also choose
to take a break to allow for other key life events. If you buy a book that
promises you a new destination – or a major life change – in one week or
one month, I hope it’s refundable. We all have the potential to achieve great
things, but if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.
Unless you are in a situation where you can upend your entire life, you
need to get real and realize that big thinking is a medium-term expedition.
We should view this expedition as medium-term because it will take years
rather than days, weeks or months, but at the same time it will not take most
of your adult life to complete it. This approach also allows for a great
work–life balance. It is not do-or-die; if you don’t get it right every single
day, it’s not the end of the world. And having a good work–life balance
should be central to the pursuit of any big-thinking goal.
As a thought experiment, cast your mind back to the person you were
five years ago. Make a mental note of any major changes you have
experienced in your life since then. The major changes do not have to be
work-related; they can include relationship changes, a bereavement, moving
country, having children, starting and finishing a degree, losing a significant
amount of weight, running a marathon, etc. Do you think that your
personality changed? Do you think that your ability to handle situations
changed? Did you change how you physically dress or wear your hair?
Make a list of all the notable changes you can recall. Now, make a list of the
changes you think you will make in the next five years.
I do this exercise sometimes when I am teaching behavioural science
executive students. But rather than asking the group to fill out both
columns, I ask them to fill in one column or the other. Every single time, I
have found that the lists written by the people who are reflecting on the last
five years are much longer, and more ambitious overall, than the lists by
those who are thinking forward to the next five years. And these are people
who have elected to attend a course for business leaders! By default, they
are expecting major future changes, right?
So what gives?
The majority of us see ourselves as having experienced many major
changes when we look backwards. However, we also imagine that the next
five years will not bring any great or significant change. We assume we will
stay more or less the same. But this is simply a behavioural science illusion.
Regardless of age, we tend to underestimate the amount we can achieve in
the medium term going forward, yet we view ourselves as having made
major progress in the medium term in the past!1
So our future selves are underachievers; and, in contrast, our past selves
are overachievers. Imagine what could have been achieved if you had
consciously set a big-thinking goal for the last two, five or even ten years
and committed to small steps to achieve it? Rather than striving for the next
pay cheque, the next pay rise or the next promotion, you could have aimed
for something bigger. You could have aimed for something different. You
could have been striving for something you really wanted. Believe me:
thinking big and taking small steps that support your ideas can reinvent
you!
But, as humans, we are impatient. We generally favour a lofty goal over
short periods because we are excited to walk in the shoes of our improved
selves sooner rather than later. And that’s pretty understandable. But it also
sets us up for failure. Very often we can’t make the changes that we need to
over the short term without completely restructuring our lives. Voices in
your head start shouting that it’s too hard, that you are unhappy and life is
too short. So you quit. And when you do so, you learn a lesson: you are a
quitter. Next time you plan a life change, you are reminded that you are a
quitter – so why even bother starting something?

When thinking big, it is never all or nothing. Regular small

positive actions have a disproportionately large positive effect
on major life outcomes.

Have you ever tried to lose weight over a short period by cutting carbs
only to fall off the wagon … by eating a wagon loaded with pasta? It’s the
same phenomenon. Or maybe there is some long-standing New Year’s
resolution that you always make but never keep to? Quitting smoking,
reading more, drinking less alcohol? Maybe every 31 December you pledge
to overhaul your career, but come 31 January you are back on autopilot
wishing for the weekend. All too often, by the end of January we lack the
energy and motivation to follow through on our best-laid plans. That’s
because short-term goals set most of us up for long-term failure.
We are creatures of routine. The easiest way to ensure that you do not
achieve a goal is to jump in too quickly. Of course, there are always
exceptions to this rule – I’m sure you’ve read plenty of stories of people
who turned their life around in two weeks. But we don’t infer a trend from
an anomaly. Besides, if you scratch the surface, you might find their story is
much more complicated. Behind a spectacular two-week turnaround there’s
often years of structured and sustained effort. It is this effort that causes the
success. It doesn’t make for a neat newspaper headline or an exciting party
anecdote – but it’s the truth.
In most cases, the person who is deemed an overnight success has long
been quietly honing their craft and creating opportunities so they can finally
be recognized for their expertise.
 There is real truth in the saying: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation
meets opportunity.’
Setting your sights on a medium-term horizon of two, five or even ten
years allows for real change. It is also a sweet spot: you will not feel a
significant drop in happiness if you begin with small steps that are peppered
into your usual routine. Your efforts will not disrupt your schedule too
aggressively, but these small steps still accumulate, and add up to
something big. This is a key insight from behavioural science:

Small changes that are actioned regularly have

disproportionate effects on our life outcomes.

This brings me back to Katie, Reyansh and Juan. Though the outcomes in
their scenarios are totally different, the problem is the same. Reyansh hasn’t
been back to university because he’s told himself he isn’t organized enough.
But being organized is a basic administrative skill that can be learned. If
you can make a cup of coffee and cash up a till, you can learn how to
organize your time. Similarly, his failure to commit to anything is
symptomatic of a fear of failure. Despite being clever and capable, Reyansh
has held himself back by never pushing himself outside his comfort zone.
He doesn’t believe change is possible.
Katie, on the other hand, has never asked what she wants for herself. It
goes without saying that she is also very capable and clever, but she’s
internalized a story of what success looks like, and – even though it isn’t
right for her – she has doggedly stuck to it. ‘What will happen if I try to do
something else?’ she thinks. ‘What will my friends say? My parents? What
if I can’t pay my mortgage?’
Juan is stuck because of status quo bias. He has hit a plateau and has not
yet taken the time to discover what he can control in order to get himself
out of it. His job is like a comfort blanket, and while he craves change,
needing this comfort is holding him back.
What might happen if Katie, Reyansh and Juan worked to overcome their
biases and took a medium-term approach towards changing their career?
A two-year journey is enough time for Katie to set up a boutique
marketing consultancy of her own. Why? Well, that two-year window
would give Katie enough time to disentangle the tasks in her job that she
likes from those she does not, register a new company, hire her first
members of staff and pivot to a happier working life.
A seven-year journey is enough time for Reyansh to become a practising
psychotherapist. How? By tracking backwards and looking at the things
he’s liked doing in his different jobs, Reyansh can identify talents – like his
people skills – and, with this discovery under his belt, choose a university
course that leverages those talents. Seven years is sufficient for him to
complete university while holding on to his barista job part-time, and then
he can make the transition to full-time practice.
A four-year journey is enough time for Juan to work on the things that
are holding him back so he can progress to managing director. What is
holding him back? Well, for one, the tendency for others in the organization
to misinterpret his easy-going manner as a lack of senior leadership
potential. Once the biases of others are recognized, they can be tackled
effectively. In a four-year window, Juan can invest in honing his confidence
and authority so he can make his added value clearer to senior colleagues in
a series of regular catch-ups he takes the liberty of scheduling. Juan is up to
that challenge.
What will happen if you go on a medium-term journey and think big?

HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

When we go on a journey, we need a map. For the journey you are about to
embark on, this book is your map. It will help you plan out and navigate
your medium-term expedition. Because we are all unique in our ambitions,
you will each have a different journey length. However, the process that all
of you go through will essentially be the same. You’re going to set
intentions to unlock new abilities and skills, and gain access to new
opportunities.
You will take the time to identify the obstacles that are standing in your
way. We often put obstacles in our own way. Obstacles are also, either
consciously or unconsciously, caused by the actions of others. These others
could be your colleagues, your friends or your family – or a combination of
all three. New abilities may be needed to allow you to successfully navigate
around such obstacles.
Most of us face both of these barriers. We hold ourselves back, and we
are held back. This book uses cutting-edge behavioural science research to
help circumvent these obstacles.
I have personally taken the time to think big. This has led me to realize
that there are a number of distinct topics that need to be tackled, and there is
a systematic way of doing so. The creation and maintenance of a big-
thinking goal has six steps that you need to work through to give yourself
the best chance of completing it.
First, there must be something well-defined to aim for. You need a big-
thinking goal. This is what you visualize when you think big. What is your
goal? What does your future self look like? When deciding what this goal
is, you will also need to identify the activities that allow you to achieve it.
These activities are like stepping stones across a lake (or pond, depending
on how ambitious you plan to be), and they are the small steps that you will
take in order to realize your big-thinking goal.
Second, you need to find time to take those small steps. More than that,
you need to recognize that humans have a tendency to be impatient – we
favour spending time engaged in activities that bring us immediate
gratification. In contrast, the activities that move you forward have pay-offs
that are in the future. Tools from behavioural science can help you prioritize
your journey and stick to your intended path, giving you the best chance of
realizing your big-thinking goal sooner rather than later.
Third, your own cognitive biases have the potential to sabotage your big
thinking. Looking inside yourself and learning what these biases are is
essential. Avoiding being trapped by your own biases is paramount to
staying on your chosen trajectory.
Fourth, the cognitive biases of others can hinder and derail your
progression. Looking to the outside world and identifying what these biases
are, and learning how to navigate around them, will ensure that your best-
laid plans aren’t scuppered by other people.
Fifth, understanding how the physical environment that you spend your
time in affects the possibility of you realizing your big-thinking goal is an
essential component to moving forward. No matter what your working
environment is like at the moment, insights from behavioural science will
allow you to make small tweaks to your surroundings that will support your
new endeavour.
Last, but certainly not least, in order to follow through and realize your
big thinking, it is necessary to harness and hone resilience. Resilience, put
simply, is not giving up on your big-thinking goal. Sounds good in
principle, but how can you do it in practice? Understanding how your own
reactions to interactions and circumstances affect how resilient you are will
allow you to make minor changes in behaviour that can have large returns
over the next few years.
These are the keys to changing gears in your life. To recap, they are:
Goal
Time
Inside
Outside
Environment
Resilience
These six topics define the content of the six chapters that make up the
core of this book. Embedded within each of these chapters is a series of
behavioural science insights. Each insight can improve the odds of you
succeeding in realizing your big-thinking goal by taking regular small steps,
starting today. However, what works for one person may not work for
another. You will learn what works for you by trying the exercises, and
using the tools that appeal most to your own experience. While you might
choose to work through only some exercises, all the behavioural science
insights listed in each chapter are worth considering. Understanding and
remembering them will help you navigate your big-thinking journey that
little bit more easily.
It might be that when you think big you discover two, three or four big
ambitions that you want to shoot for. In order to work on these most
effectively, I would recommend that you pick your top priority, and go
through the book developing a plan for this one goal only. Then you might
want to work through the book again, with your second and then your third
big goal in mind. And while this book is focused primarily on the world of
work, you can use these techniques to make your big thinking come to
fruition in any area of your life. Perhaps you want to learn a language, write
a novel or run a marathon – or all three! The processes detailed in the
chapters that follow can help you get on track in any field.
Get this right once, and you can lean on the approach time and time
again. It will become like a ‘rinse, wash and repeat’ for avoiding the biases
and blind spots that used to hold you back.
 So are you ready to think big, take small steps and build the career you
want? Then let’s get going …

Happy planning!
 CHAP T E R 2

Goal
IS THE STORY YOU TELL ABOUT YOURSELF TRUE?
When I was growing up in Ireland, I was terrified of needles. Really
terrified. From convincing a friend that looked nothing like me to stand in
for me, to passing out and requiring multiple stitches in my head, having
blood drawn was always a dramatic event. My father likes to tell the story
of him sitting in a doctor’s waiting room chatting amiably to a nun while I
was getting my blood taken. A nurse popped her head around the door and
asked him to come inside. ‘Your daughter is very distressed,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you should be with her when the needle goes in. I can see from her
records that she has previously fainted.’
The nun looked at my father in disbelief and exclaimed, ‘Shame on you!
You should have been in there all this time. Poor little mite. A child needs
their dad at times like this!’
My dad stood up slowly and responded, ‘My daughter is twenty-five.’
My needle phobia continued to haunt me throughout the rest of my
twenties. It sounds hilarious in hindsight, but the cold sweats, shaking,
nausea and fainting weren’t funny to me at the time. So when I was told that
I had type 1 diabetes in 2011, when I had just entered my thirties, it had a
particularly sharp edge. I feel I took the news that I needed to inject myself
with insulin five times a day for the rest of my life pretty calmly, given my
severe phobia. I simply asked the consultant how long I was going to live
without insulin because I had no intention of injecting. In my eyes, my
quality of life would be zero, so what was the point?
This statement was taken so seriously that I was given a firm lecture
about the possibility of being committed into an institution involuntarily. I
was also told I would not be allowed to leave the hospital that night until I
had injected successfully.
Today I inject five times a day, often in public without being noticed, and
it’s no big deal. While before I held tightly to the belief that I had an
unshakeable fear of needles, my personal narrative has well and truly
changed.

The power of our own narratives to shape both our actions

and inactions is tremendous.

Narratives cut across all aspects of our lives, including our ability to
think big and make things happen in our careers.

IS SOMETHING ALREADY BLOCKING YOUR PATH?

When we start to formulate any medium-term plan, the first thing we need
to do is set a big-thinking goal. Otherwise you won’t know when you’ve
reached your destination. However, there is a crucial step that comes ahead
of establishing your goal. Before you put pen to paper and conjure up
images of what you will be doing in a few years, stop and think about the
mental barriers that stand in the way of you visualizing the career of your
dreams.
Have you ever thought about creating a podcast, only to push the thought
out of your head because you have no experience of any of the stages of
podcast creation? Have you ever considered learning how to fly a
helicopter, only to file it away with all the other wishful-thinking projects?
Have you ever wanted to go rambling around the world for months on end,
only to smile and think it’s just a pipe dream?
Do you have an idea of the person you want to be, but it seems so out of
reach that you have already scaled back your ambition?
It is not too hard to formulate a plan that will enable you to achieve your
big-thinking goal, once you have a final destination in your mind’s eye.
Later in this chapter, I will give you some behavioural science insights
which, if followed, will help you on your big-thinking journey. These
insights will ensure that you intentionally move towards ME+.
ME+ is the person you will be after you have realized your big-thinking.
It is the person you will be when you finish your medium-term expedition.
ME+ has the career that you visualize when you think big. Soon, you will
do this visualization and create an image of ME+.
But before that, let’s do the hard bit and uncover any personal narratives
that may be holding you back …
 What stories are you telling yourself that stand in the way of your
success?

WHAT NARRATIVES ARE HOLDING YOU BACK?

When I start something new, at some point close to initiation, I see a
mountain but I cannot see the summit. So I procrastinate. I tell myself I
don’t have enough time to fit everything in. At my weakest moments –
usually when I’m tired – I tell myself a story. This is a tale about how I’m
doing too much already and I shouldn’t continue. I don’t carry out a time
audit of the twenty-four hours available in my day – because that would
reveal the many hours that I could put towards mastering my new task –
and instead I let myself off the hook. I stop doing the activity.
I’m not talking here about the things that are a waste of my time, like
pointless meetings and endless emailing. I’m talking about the big
challenges that can really move the needle both in my work and beyond.
My narrative – the story I tell myself – is that I am too busy.
There are many stories people tell themselves that prevent them from
starting something. Perhaps, for you, it is, ‘I’m not smart enough!’ Or
maybe, ‘I’m good at enough things already.’ Or perhaps, ‘I don’t take risks
like that.’ Another common narrative is: ‘I will never be as good as those
other people, so why even bother?’
You tell yourself you don’t have control over what happens next. Maybe
you tell yourself you don’t want to start something that you can’t give your
whole self to. This tendency for perfectionism causes you to only initiate
things that can be completed perfectly and successfully. The perfectionist
narrative ensures your goals remain unfulfilled.
Stories like these serve a purpose. They insulate us from failure and keep
us inside our comfort zone. They help us save face. Coming out of our
comfort zone doesn’t feel so good. It involves risk. It’s scary. Narratives are
a safety blanket that keep you wrapped up tight. But unless your big-
thinking goal is to stay in your comfort zone, you’re going to have to step
outside it at some point.

IDENTIFYING YOUR NARRATIVES

So you need to identify the narratives that are holding you back. This
sounds easy to do, but it can be harder than you think. Take a moment now
to ask yourself some questions. Do any of the narratives listed in the last
section ring true for you? Are there others that come to mind? The
narratives you tell yourself might be expressed aloud in the excuses you use
when you are turning down an opportunity. They’re the voices that creep
into your head in the form of worries or doubts about whether you are up to
the challenges that come your way. They may even keep you up at night.
Try to be as literal as possible about the narratives that apply to you. The
more detailed you are, the more likely you are to identify them accurately –
and also realize why they came about in the first place. For example, if you
get an invitation to do some public speaking and the first thought that pops
into your head is, ‘I can’t do that’, ask yourself why. If the answer is that
you are not good enough, probe your thoughts for the underlying reason.
You may hear things such as, ‘I’m not ready’, ‘I’m not a credible public
speaker’, ‘I don’t have that level of knowledge’, ‘I’ll choke’ or ‘I’d be
terrified’. Write these down. Chances are that these are stories that are not
credible. After all, if they were true, why would you have been asked to
speak in the first place?
The stories we tell ourselves are kept alive with the help of confirmation
bias.
 Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to
favour information which confirms their previously existing
beliefs, discounting examples that do not support the
narrative that they hold on to. In other words, if you hold a
narrative that you are not good enough to take a public-
speaking gig, you will look for evidence to support that notion.
You pay attention to the gaps in your expertise that you still
have to fill, and ignore all the thoughtful and innovative
contributions you have made in the subject you are being
asked to speak on. Worse, you ignore the fact that external
folk see you as enough of an expert to extend the invitation in
the first place!
This is typical when it comes to confirmation bias.
Disconfirming evidence is ignored, and instead we seek
‘proof’ that backs up our beliefs. Equally, if you hold a belief
that you are doing enough already to move ahead in your
career, and that your plateau is other people’s fault, you look
for evidence to support that notion. You focus on the added
value that you gave in the meeting on Monday, and overlook
the opportunity to network with senior colleagues that you
chose to miss on Tuesday. And if you hold on to a narrative
that you have no time to expand your business, then you will
focus on how overwhelmed you feel about your current
workload, and ignore the significant amount of time you spend
on social media or watching TV. Worse, you might even load
up your current schedule with meaningless tasks which do not
add value.

If you want to change, you need to identify the false stories you have
constructed about yourself. And then you need to do something to combat
them.
Jot down the narratives that you think are holding you back in the first
column of the table below. The second column is for the small steps that
will help change these narratives – you will add these later.

Narrative Change
 THE THEORY OF NARRATIVES
It may seem a bit unusual to be asked to reflect on whether your narratives
are holding you back. After all, wouldn’t you know already if this were the
case? Well, not necessarily. Narratives are created unconsciously, and many
of the most powerful ideas in psychology and personal development already
recognize the power of such narratives. Let’s take a whirlwind tour of some
of the most important work that links to the stories we tell ourselves …
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has gained ground all over the
world in treating anxiety and depression. Essentially, this talk therapy
focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and
behaviour. Negative thinking patterns can start in childhood. For example,
if you didn’t receive much attention from your parents, as an adult you may
automatically think ‘I’m just not good enough’ when things don’t go your
way. But there will always be times when you ‘lose’ – whether it’s a client,
a promotion or a project. This narrative may make you feel so bad that you
don’t put yourself out there, and in the future you only seek situations
where you feel comfortable. CBT forces you to challenge your
interpretation of situations. Essentially, it helps you to change your
narrative so you hear a different story.
In her insightful book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol
Dweck puts forward a theory which views people as one of two types. The
first has a fixed mindset. They assume that their abilities are innate and
cannot be changed. A person with a fixed mindset might be heard saying,
‘I’m just not good with numbers’ or ‘I can’t speak in public’. A person with
a fixed mindset hates to fail, so avoids situations where they might. If a
person with a fixed mindset is forced to participate in an activity that they
believe they are not good at, they view it through that lens. A fumbled
sentence when speaking in public? That’s evidence that they do not belong
on a speaker’s podium. They decline the request next time round. They lean
on confirmation bias.
 The second type of person has a growth mindset. They believe that they
can, at any time, acquire new skills. They thrive on challenges, and embrace
their failures as learning opportunities. They believe that, with effort,
anything is possible. The result is that people with growth mindsets are
open to changing their narrative. They keep an open mind regarding the
possibility that they can gain the necessary skills to become tomorrow’s
leaders, innovators and experts. We know that anyone can acquire new
skills when they put their mind to it, so we should all try to develop a
growth mindset by reminding ourselves of this.
Another powerful psychological theory is locus of control. This is the
extent to which a person feels that they have control over the events that
influence their lives – or their career path. A person who believes that they
have control over what happens is said to have an internal locus of control.
A person who believes that they have no control over what happens has an
external locus of control. For people with an external locus of control,
regardless of what happens, there’s no personal culpability and no lessons
for them to learn. If their business fails, it was down to the economy. If they
lose a client, that client is unreasonable. If their book gets rejected, it
doesn’t need revising.
In contrast, people with an internal locus of control take responsibility.
They seek out opportunities. The narrative is always, ‘I am responsible!’ –
whether the end result is good or bad. Luck has no role for a person with an
external locus of control. They believe only in talent and effort, and claim
you ‘make your own luck’. Think about what that means for someone
whose career faces a series of unexpected setbacks – for example, people
who have lost their jobs because the economy has contracted. Lay-offs
happen to talented people all the time. For those who are laid off and have
an internal locus of control, internalizing the blame for this bad luck has a
deteriorating effect on their well-being.
In Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life, Paul Dolan
highlights the power of narratives and documents how the stories we tell
ourselves can really harm us in areas of life such as marriage, the pursuit of
happiness, and income. He argues that we are addicted to doing what is
expected of us. We internalize these expectations and a narrative emerges of
what we ‘ought to do’ in life, which may not resemble what will bring us
joy. This narrative becomes part of us, regardless of whether we are suited
to it.
 All of these psychological frameworks emphasize the importance of
paying attention to personal narratives. You may have positive narratives in
one aspect of your life and negative aspects in another. An ‘I’m not worth
it’ narrative may have you stuck in a relationship that isn’t good for you. An
‘I will never be as good as those people’ narrative may be preventing you
from starting Krav Maga, and keeping you binge-watching Breaking Bad.

Narratives are pernicious – you often don’t notice them

because they’re part of who you tell yourself you are.

But you can always change. And becoming aware of them is the first
step.

CHANGING YOUR NARRATIVE

When I made the decision to prioritize the self-care of my type 1 diabetes
and start injecting, obviously I had little choice in the matter – it was
literally life or death. But people all around us are choosing to change their
narratives every day, by engaging in processes that ultimately fulfil a goal
they seek to achieve. Smokers start vaping (new process) as a substitute for
cigarettes, and so stop smoking cigarettes (ultimate goal). Social media
addicts leave their phone by the door as they come into their home (process)
to allow for quality family time (ultimate goal). To achieve any goal, you
need to focus on the process. Over time, the narrative changes to ‘I am a
non-smoker’ or ‘I make space for family’.
Even if you cannot identify clearly what the narratives stopping you
advancing towards ME+ are, by identifying a process that leads to a goal
you want to achieve, you will cause a new narrative to be internalized.
Every time you engage in the process, you are writing a new line in your
narrative. At some point, you will have written a whole new character into
your story. You will continue writing the story, but the effort it takes will be
much lower once the character has been defined because you already know
what they’re going to do in a given situation. It may not be easy, but efforts
to change personal narratives that are not serving you are well spent.
Think back, and try to remember a time where you changed your own
narrative. What were the processes that enabled this change? If you had a
bad spell in your relationship, how did you emerge from it? Maybe you
committed to a date night? Perhaps you went to counselling? Or did you
find a shared hobby? If you went from zero to decent at chess, how did it
come about? Did you practise at a weekly club? Or online? If you learned a
new language as an adult, how did you do it? Did you go to a class? Or
teach yourself with an app? These are the processes that caused the
emergence of a new narrative. You engage in these processes, and if you do
them often enough, at some point you notice that the narrative has changed.
Below are some examples of negative narratives, and the processes that
could be employed to disrupt them. Look back at the narratives you wrote
down earlier (see p. 28), and identify one that is holding back ME+. Next,
think of a process that can help you emerge from this negative narrative,
and write that in the ‘Change’ column. What is the new narrative that
engaging in this process leads to?1
Make a commitment to set some time aside each week, perhaps on a
Sunday evening, to reflect on how successful you have been in your chosen
process the previous week, and plan ahead for the next week.
 Examples of narratives, processes to change them, and the
new narratives that follow:

1 Narrative: I eat junk food daily.

Process: Make a conscious effort to prepare and freeze
my lunches for the week every Sunday night.
New narrative: I am a healthy eater. I eat healthily most
days, and have far more energy and fewer energy slumps.

2 Narrative: I am unproductive. I was unproductive every day

last week and my to-do list constantly overwhelms me.
Process: Only check/answer emails and surf the web
between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
New narrative: I am productive. My mornings are more
productive and free from distraction. I get to clock off earlier
each evening.

3 Narrative: I am not good enough. Everyone around me at

work is doing better than me, and they are achieving their
goals at a much faster pace.
Process: Benchmark my progress against myself, and
don’t devote time to comparing myself to others. Instead,
track my own accomplishments and advancements once a
week in a journal.
New narrative: I am proud of myself, as I am moving
forward. My self-esteem has risen and I am happier at
work.

Notice that, in the examples above, the process never relies on other people.
This is a necessary condition when choosing the process. Engaging in such
a process repeatedly allows a new narrative to emerge that replaces the
older, negative narrative.

REIMAGINING YOUR STRENGTHS AND DIFFICULTIES

Have you ever heard that boys are innately better at maths? Have you also
heard that girls are better at verbal skills? These claims are really just based
on a straw man. Sadly, most children are aware of the stereotypes and end
up actively internalizing them – little Jenny knows she is expected to be bad
at maths and lives down to that expectation. This causes girls to do worse at
maths – and, likewise, makes boys worse at verbal skills.2 It is a self-
fulfilling prophecy.
Self-fulfilling prophecies cause poorer performance. Once I believe
something about myself it becomes a personal narrative, and personal
narratives have tremendous power in determining the actions I take. If I tell
myself I am bad at maths, I will approach every study session with a
negative lens and each hour of study feels longer and more difficult. On the
other hand, if I tell myself I love maths and that I’m a naturally brilliant
mathematician, it isn’t such a struggle.
In 2015 I met Jennifer, who had just given up on creating a new fitness
app. Jennifer had all the ingredients for her new business down pat – a great
team, a solid business plan and a great product. However, Jennifer also held
a belief that she had poor interpersonal skills, and was bad at selling herself
and her product. Because of this belief, the first time she met a funder she
was nervous, fluffed her lines and did not inspire confidence. She did not
get backed.
Jennifer internalized this behaviour. She gave herself a good mental
kicking and labelled herself a failure. When she tried a second time, the
same thing happened. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth. Jennifer
told herself a story regarding her strengths and difficulties which became a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, there is no reason why self-fulfilling
prophecies need to have negative outcomes.
Rather than viewing your strengths and difficulties as fixed traits, it is
much more useful to think of them as an external part of who you are,
caused by your behaviour. Think of strengths and difficulties as being the
result of a process that you engage in.
Too many people think of strengths and difficulties as an inherent part of
who they are. It is true that there is a genetic component to many important
human traits and life outcomes. For many of us, the three most precious
things we will nurture throughout our life-course are health, happiness and
intelligence. Do you think that these are fixed when you’re born? Do you
think that these parts of us are fully determined by our genetics? The
answer – thankfully – is no.
 When disentangling a genetic component as a determinant of a particular
outcome, researchers often study twins. Such studies analyse what happens
in the lives of identical and non-identical sets of twins reared in the same
household. These studies exploit the fact that identical twins share all of the
same genes, and non-identical twins share 50 per cent of them. Similarity in
the outcomes observed in identical and non-identical sets of twins is thus
taken as a genetic component, rather than attributed to the environment.
So what have these studies concluded about the genetic component of
being happy and smart? The genetic component of intelligence is estimated
by researchers to be somewhere between 20 and 60 per cent.3 This leaves
somewhere between 40 and 80 per cent of the variation in intelligence to be
determined by your own deliberate small steps and daily circumstances.
Perhaps you care less about intelligence and only want to be happy?
Research suggests that about 50 per cent of your happiness is determined by
factors outside genetics.4 The small actions you take every day really do
shape your well-being.
So what should you take away from this discussion on genetics and
heritability?

You can change your own life outcomes.

There is lots of wiggle room to go from suboptimal to awesome. A good

starting point to get to awesomeness? Change the behaviour that you link to
a particular narrative. Rather than labelling yourself as unproductive, take a
small step (a process) to initiate change that aligns with your big thinking.
How do you become a hill walker? You walk hills often enough and you get
that label. How do you become a public speaker? You speak regularly
enough to audiences on a topic you have expertise in, and you get to call
yourself a public speaker.
Always focus on processes rather than outcomes because it is processes
that are firmly within your control.

BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE INSIGHTS

Changing narratives that do not serve you well is hard but really worth the
effort. To be crystal clear, I’m not asking you to change your authentic self.
In fact, I’m asking you to do the opposite. I’m not trying to change
introverts into extroverts. I’m not asking that those of you who shy away
from competition become more competitive. Rather, I am asking you to
have a vision of your ME+ that is free from mental blocks. Once you have
that, you can set about identifying the skills that are required to get you
there, recognizing the naysayer in your head as a constructed narrative that
should be shushed when it tells you that you’re not up to the challenge.
To help you think big and decide on a big-thinking goal for ME+, what
follows are ten behavioural science insights. You should work through these
insights one by one in the order they appear in the text. Your reward? You
will end up with a medium-term plan complete with commitments to
regular activities. These regular activities are the small steps you will take
to ensure you realize your big-thinking ambition for ME+.
Are you ready?

INSIGHT 1: WHAT IS ME+ DOING DAILY?

We all have the ability to think big regardless of where we are in our lives.
The book you are (hopefully) engrossed in right now was conceived in
November 2017, after I was discharged from being in intensive care.
Having very successfully controlled my diabetes for many years, I took my
eye off the ball in late 2017 and ended up with diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-
threatening condition that occurs if type 1 diabetics don’t control their
sugars properly. I was discharged from hospital with strict instructions to
improve the management of my chronic illness, a challenge I willingly
accepted after being scared silly. On that day, I made a self-care plan, which
– you guessed it – involved a lot of small steps to help me realize big health
gains. But you want to know something else? I also made a plan to write a
book that would bring behavioural science lessons to a wider audience than
the students that I meet at the LSE. This plan included a list of the activities
I would need to engage in to help me fulfil this ambition. These activities
were the small steps that I incorporated into my daily schedule.
Back then, my ME+ goal was to write a book. Identifying that big-
thinking goal gave me clarity on the small steps I needed to take to get
there. Wherever you are in life today, focusing on what ME+ will be doing
in the future allows you to realize opportunities in a few years that seem far
beyond the current horizon – and in a way that isn’t all or nothing.
So how do you get started? You think big and visualize your ME+.
 You must first set a big-thinking goal that can realistically be achieved
with hard work. For instance, if you are holding out to be a professional
rugby player but are not actively playing the sport, and are approaching
forty, this is a fantasy. There is zero demand for rugby players of this age
and experience. If you are approaching forty and hope to be a leader in
business but do not have business acumen, there is a very long shot it can
be your ME+. In this case, the obstacle is that you are very behind in
experience compared to others aiming for the same goal, and the number of
leadership positions is very small. But if you are approaching forty, have
stagnated on the career rung just before middle management, and want to
make it to a leadership role, this is a ME+ where major progress can be
made over the medium term.
Thinking about your future self creates the space to consider how you
really want to be earning your living. Don’t focus on the lifestyle you want
– it’s no good thinking big about the holidays you’re going to go on or the
restaurants you want to eat in. Instead, concentrate on the activities you
want to be engaged in that will pay for that lifestyle. Ideally, the thought of
engaging in these activities will fill you with passion. You will be excited at
the thought of getting out of bed every morning. These days, we work
longer weeks and retire much later. Many of us spend the majority of our
time either in work or thinking about work. So you want to get to a place
where you are doing some of what you love. And your big thinking needs to
reflect that.
When you are doing what you love, the cost of the effort in engaging in
processes is near zero, and the odds of you delivering something special are
high. Your work is not draining you. In fact, your work may even be life-
enhancing.
Moving away from just wanting to earn a fat salary to identifying
activities that you will enjoy (at least most of the time) is absolutely
necessary if you want to create a plan for your journey that you will stick
to, while also improving your quality of life. We are all programmed to
want more money for doing less. (Although, if you are British, it is
impossibly rude to say that out loud.) However, the evidence that links
income to happiness is thin on the ground – once you pass a relatively
modest level that allows you to have life’s necessities with a small
sprinkling of treats. If you only focus on money, you will lose the chance to
find out what you love doing. You will also miss out on the opportunity to
get paid for doing it.

By thinking in terms of the activities that you really want to be

doing, you can identify the small steps you need to take to
realize ME+.

By thinking in terms of processes, you will develop a keen self-

awareness of where you should be expending your efforts. And, most
importantly, you will actively cultivate the narrative that you have control
over who your ME+ turns out to be. The small steps become something you
engage in regularly. They are the processes, and these processes get woven
into your personal narrative.
I want you to visualize starting work on a morning a few years from now,
as ME+. You could be getting dressed for a commute into anywhere from
Palo Alto to the City of London. Perhaps you’re working from home, or
sitting in a local café. You might be dressed in shorts, a suit or never get out
of your pyjamas. But what will you actually be doing once your working
day starts?
Now is the time to decide on the activities of the job ME+ will be doing.
Do you want to coach and develop others? Do you want to make decisions
on how resources should be spent in a company? Do you want to sell
something – maybe your own invention, or a consultancy service? Do you
want to write for a living? Do you want to care for others?
Take some time now to fill in the table below. If you already know what
you want to do, it will be very easy for you to complete. There are separate
questions for those of you who plan to stay on the same career trajectory
but accelerate, and those who want to start on a new path – which may
mean freelancing, starting a business or moving to an entirely new job.
If you are less certain on what ME+ will be doing, simply focus on
identifying the activities you enjoy. Circle anything that you would like to
be paid to do in the future, crossing through those that don’t strike a chord
with you. The activities that have no circle or cross-through represent those
that you will do without complaint, but you wouldn’t be upset if they were
taken away.
If you still don’t have a clear vision of what you want to do yet – fear not.
Devote your attention to identifying a couple of activities that you would
enjoy. Your approach can be something of a grid search. You will engage in
any broad activities that you managed to identify, assess how much you
enjoyed the experience, and define your tastes more clearly as you repeat
the process and learn more about what you enjoy doing and the
opportunities each activity opens up for you.

WHAT ME+ WILL BE DOING

Complete the following statements:

The overall big-thinking goal for ME+ is …..

ME+’s job title will be …..

ME+ will be working in the ….. industry

The company ME+ will be working for is ….. (If you are intending
on starting your own company, note that here)

ME+ will be running (/working in) a company that has the following
characteristics …..

Provide a list in response to one of the following statements:

ME+ will be in a similar role, but my responsibilities will have

expanded to include:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

ME+ will be in an entirely new career, and ME+’s responsibilities

will include:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
 There is also a blank row at the end of the table. This is a space in which
to write more specific activities. It will be most useful to those of you who
have a clear vision of what ME+ will be doing. It allows you to move from
the very broad activities listed in the table and narrow things down.
For example, building on ‘Making strategic decisions’ and ‘Solving
problems’, you could have something like ‘Deciding what capital structure
will be for a pharmaceutical company, and offering solutions as to what
debt-to-equity ratio should be maintained in the face of economic
turbulence’. Instead of ‘Coordinating the work and activities of others’, you
might have ‘Coordinating the work and activities of others to ensure that
orders are fulfilled and my customers are satisfied with my dog shampoo
company’. Instead of ‘Performing for the public’, it might be more relevant
to write ‘Practising lines for my part in the latest Broadway musical’. And
instead of ‘Assisting and caring for others’, you might write ‘Bringing the
children in my care to the park for a nature walk’.
You get the idea …

INSIGHT 2: WHAT SKILL SET DOES ME+ POSSESS?

It is one thing to decide to be an author who will write a book to bring
behavioural science insights to wider audiences. It is quite another to make
this happen in a way that is actually a success story. Convincing both an
agent and a publisher to support you – two necessary ingredients for
success – in a world where scores of other people are trying to do the same,
is a tricky business. During December 2017, I felt as if I had been slapped
in the face with a wet fish when I realized that I lacked several of the core
skills that would allow me to fulfil my dream of being a published author.
While I may have been well-versed in the details of behavioural science
research and an academic writing style by that point, I knew little about
how to translate important messages in a manner that would entice people
like you to read them on their commute, during their sacred vacation time,
or before they turn off the lights at night. Writing in such a style was a skill
I did not yet have. It was necessary for me to acknowledge this skill gap
and address it.

What exactly is stopping you doing the activities you have

identified? What are the new skills you need in order to be
taken seriously as an expert?
 It is time for you to identify the skills that ME+ will draw on, in order to
make salient any gaps you need to address. The table below lists some
common skills to help you do just that. You will notice a close resemblance
between the activities in the last table and the skills listed here. That is
because by doing the activity (for example, engaging in a negotiation
process) you are taking a small step that hones a skill (allowing you to
eventually become an expert in negotiations).
Can you pick out the skills in the table below that ME+ will need? Circle
those that you will need the most. You should aim to circle at least three
skills, and no more than five. Your journey to ME+ is a period of time
where you will engage in small steps that develop these skills. The activities
you identified in the last section will be some of these small steps, and the
skills are the outcome.
 I have left space at the end of the table for people who already know the
skills they need. The more detail you go into about these skills, the more
focused your path to ME+ will be. Use this blank row to be as precise as
you can possibly be.
 If it is difficult for you to pinpoint the skills you need, another approach
is to decide on the type of work you want ME+ to do and identify role
models. Find three people already doing the kind of job you want who seem
highly credible, and find out what skills they draw on daily. If you have
direct access to the person, you can simply ask them what the most valuable
skills they possess are. If you do not know the person, you can identify their
skills by reading books that describe their journey to success, looking at
their CV or LinkedIn profile, or googling them to find videos and articles
about how they got to where they are.

INSIGHT 3: GETTING THE SKILLS ME+ NEEDS

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I decided that 2018 would be the year for
me to read a hundred or so books aimed at audiences like you. I would do
this with intention, noting what I liked and didn’t like about each, and
paying attention to online reviews and critiques. My office at the LSE today
is a graveyard for the books I studied, just in case I choose to resurrect them
one day and reread the content or my musings in the margins.
I attended writing classes, creativity classes, and public events where
newly published authors in popular non-fiction described their work and
their personal journey. The worst part? I socialized at these events! I call
this the worst part because I’m not a natural networker who usually enjoys
chit-chatting with strangers. I’m actually quite an introvert.
Reading, studying and networking were the three activities I did often in
2018 to cultivate the skill set that I knew would allow me to write this book.
What activities will you do regularly to cultivate the skill set of your ME+?

In behavioural science, there is a lot of research to suggest

saliency is essential if you want to provoke an action. Saliency
means that something is made noticeable or prominent.

Now that you have identified the skills you need to develop, make an
effort to keep them salient amid the hustle and bustle of daily life. How can
you do that? I suggest writing them on Post-it notes and sticking them
somewhere you look at every day. You need to start gearing your life
towards these skills, and thinking about them as often as possible.
The next step to making your ME+ a reality involves incorporating the
activities you identified in the first table in this chapter into your weekly
routine. By doing these activites regularly, they organically become part of
your narrative, and you hone the skills you have chosen.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman

distinguishes between our brain’s System 1 and System 2
thinking.5 System 1 is the brain’s automatic and quick
responses: it is your fast brain. Your fast brain causes you to
curse loudly when you stub your toe. It is why you find
yourself driving to work rather than to the park on a Saturday
morning. It’s your brain on autopilot. Thanks to our fast brain,
we plough through familiar tasks at work even when we are
very tired. We also do not think twice about our habits or
routines. Our narratives do not get time to chatter. It’s all a bit
robotic.
System 2 is slower, more deliberate. It allows you to solve a
tricky maths problem. Our slow brain helps us figure out the
terms and conditions of our mortgage. It is for heavy-lifting
thinking and only used sparingly, when deep thought is
required. Using our slow brain is tiring. This means that a lot
of our actions are the result of decisions made by our fast
brain.
You can change your career trajectory by making your
engagement in activities (small steps) a regular event in your
diary. By integrating specific repetitive actions into your
schedule, you are reprogramming the fast brain or System 1.
You are getting your fast brain to view yourself as a different
type of person, with a new set of habits. Eventually, engaging
in them will become part of your being.

Take Jerome. At twenty-four he decided he wanted to move from working

as an analyst in banking into a job where he would get to write computer
code for online games. What is really fantastic is that Jerome had a clear
idea of what he wanted to do. The problem? He had never studied computer
science, had never written a line of code in his life, and had no money in the
bank to undertake a university degree.
 Undeterred, Jerome researched online programming courses. Over the
next two years he set about teaching himself to code in JavaScript and
Python, using free online resources. He did this religiously from 8 p.m. to
10 p.m. every weekday, after he’d finished his dinner and gone on a two-
mile jog. This was his process. This dedication to learning his new skill was
difficult at first, but it soon became part of his new normal. Jerome is still
on his journey – he hasn’t quite secured his dream job yet, but he is
freelancing and writing code for a variety of clients. By doing this, he is
getting professional experience and also exposure to people who can
recommend jobs and write references for him in the future. Crucially,
Jerome is much happier than he was when he was working as a banking
analyst.
So how can you cultivate the new skills you need for ME+? Simple.
Begin by making a commitment to engage in one or more regular activities.
These may be the activities you identified earlier this chapter (see pp. 42–
3), or you may consider other activities which we will discuss shortly. The
key to choosing activities is that they should be something that you have the
resources (money and time) to do, and something that you can easily carry
out at a regular time each day or week. Engaging in the activities should
become part of your routine. You also want the activity to challenge you
enough so you are outside your comfort zone, but not so much that you are
overwhelmed. It should require you to be on your metaphorical tippy-toes
but nothing further – so you are stretching but not stretched.6
Overall, there are three types of activities that I want you to consider
engaging in:
1 On the job. Find opportunities for networking and training within
your current job.
2 Put yourself out there. Get out and expand your current network to
include people outside your immediate circle.
3 Continuous learning. Make time each week to advance your current
skill set by engaging in continuous learning.

INSIGHT 4: HONE ME+’S SKILLS ON THE JOB

Universities focus on the success of traditional peer-reviewed academic
writing, look for quality over quantity, and aim to deliver excellent teaching
to their students. Universities have many internal training opportunities, but
none that would help me hone the skills I needed to write this book in 2018.
At least, not at first glance.
One of the best things about working at the LSE is the regular series of
free public events they run (worth checking out if you are ever in London –
and you can listen to their podcasts if you are not), and sometimes I can get
access to the people who are speaking at those events if I am tenacious.
More and more, academics who have become known in a particular field
are writing books that convey the messages of their learnings all in one
place. By the time they were standing on the stage at an LSE event I was
attending, some of them had successfully gone through the journey I was
just embarking on. Surely this subset would have pearls of wisdom to
share?
Whatever you do for work on a daily basis, take a moment to reflect on
whether there are real opportunities on offer there that can move you
forward. Like me, you may need to look more than once before you see
what is on your own doorstep. For example, if you currently work for a big
organization, there are likely to be internal training offerings. If the training
offerings in your firm sound about as pleasant as a root canal and as useful
as a chocolate fireguard, don’t be put off. Ask human resources – or your
manager directly – to organize a course that is in line with the skills you
would like to develop.
If you want to pursue something far away from the job you have now,
this is still a conversation worth having. More and more companies allow
their employees to do developmental courses that don’t have a direct link to
their current role. You can also request funding from your firm to do
courses externally (see Insight 6 below). In smaller or medium-sized firms,
there is often cash set aside to allow employees to upgrade their skills – this
is worth asking about, even if it is not advertised widely. And if you are the
director of a company, freelancing or trying to scale your start-up, training
courses are a legitimate business expense, making them more affordable.
Your current day-to-day work likely gives you plenty of opportunities to
expose yourself to people who already do what you’re interested in. These
could be co-workers, clients, or people you collaborate with unofficially.
There are two reasons why it is worth building relationships with these
people. First, they can offer you valuable advice regarding your plans.
Second, they may be able to give you – or point you towards –
opportunities that are relevant for your ME+.
 If you’re not good at networking in groups (my hand is firmly raised
here), commit to getting to know more people on a one-on-one basis. These
meetings can be over coffee, lunch or a drink. Try to connect with people
who have the skills you are trying to acquire, regardless of their level of
experience. Do not solely look to those who are ahead of you; identify
colleagues at any stage of their career who you see as being like ME+ in
some regard. Aim to understand what they do, why they do it and how.
Start by identifying and reaching out to colleagues (or clients) who can
give you experience or advice that will allow you to develop the skills ME+
needs. In general, none of us likes asking for help, out of a fear that we will
be rejected (and possibly laughed at – later in the book I will introduce you
to the saving face effect). The pain of potential rejection is caused by the
uncertainty of whether the person will say yes, and our overestimation of
the odds that they will say no.7 It is the anticipatory pain of the response,
rather than the actual pain experienced if we are told no, that prevents us
from asking. But fear not! The probability of getting an encouraging
response is high. We tend to underestimate how likely we are to get a
positive response. This comes through clearly in a recent study of 14,000
people that illustrates that the tendency to say yes to requests is much
higher than is expected by those doing the asking.8 In general, we don’t ask
for help as often as we should.
We also overestimate the probability that other people will ask for our
help when it is needed. One 2010 study, by Vanessa Bohns and Francis
Flynn, asked peer advisors and teaching assistants at a university to predict
the number of students who would ask them for help during the next
semester. Overall, the advisors estimated that about 30 per cent more
students would come forward than actually did!
As a fun self-experiment, when you are asking for help, write down
whether you think a positive response is likely. Once you have ten or so
requests in the bank, compare the actual outcomes to the predictions that
you made. This allows for a fast check of the degree to which you
personally underestimate your ability to get others to lend you a hand.
So now you’ve decided to ask for help in making ME+ a reality, how can
you increase the likelihood of success in your request? In general, if you
want a positive response, do it face-to-face.9
Behavioural science tip: put people on the spot when you need help, as
the cost to them of saying no is high. Why? Like all of us, the person whose
help you need will not like awkward conversations. They probably also
worry that saying no may insinuate something about their feelings towards
you.10 And face-to-face requests are preferable to emailing. Yes, the time-
cost of asking face-to-face is higher, but there is the reward of a much
greater chance of success.11
More good news: behavioural science research shows that once a person
agrees to help, they are more likely be agreeable next time around. In fact,
in behavioural science the Ben Franklin effect describes how people are
more likely to do a favour for someone they have previously helped out
than they are for someone who has helped them out. Why? We like to be
consistent. If we think a person is deserving of our help the first time
around (i.e. we said yes to their request), then it is logical that they will be
deserving next time around (subject to them not behaving like a jerk in
between).
Even better: if we ask someone for help and they say no, the second time
around they are more likely to say yes (especially if you ask them face-to-
face)! The cost of saying no and being viewed as socially uncooperative is
even higher the second time at the rodeo!

How you frame your request when asking someone for help is
important.

It should be clear to the recipient that it is mutually beneficial, or at least

have a net benefit for them. Actually, I’ll rephrase that: there should be an
obvious benefit. Your newfound ambitions should not be taxing on your
colleagues in terms of their personal time and effort. This sounds like a no-
brainer, but you would be surprised at the number of people who think it’s a
good idea to email folk for support in a new endeavour with no thought as
to how much the request eats into that person’s time. Requests like these are
easy to ignore – particularly if asked via email.
It has been shown time and time again that the framing of requests
matters,12 so ensure you emphasize the benefits of your request to the other
person. In addition, always make it super easy for them to say yes. If you
have to approach them via email first in order to meet them in person,
provide a number of dates for the person so they can choose quickly what
works for them. Otherwise, you will waste their time playing email ping-
pong. Or worse, the time-costs of the ping-pong may be seen as too high, so
they may not even bother responding. Finally, always keep emails short.
Nobody needs an essay.
Overall, you should aim to reach out to one person a month on the job.
This is a commitment that most of us can stick to very easily. It is also
something you can commit to right now! In the space below, identify the
people that you will reach out to over the next three months.

In the next three months, I will reach out to:

1) _______________
2) _______________
3) _______________

INSIGHT 5: HONE ME+’S SKILLS BY PUTTING YOURSELF OUT

THERE
It happened that my commitment to attending public events at the LSE in
2018 meant I was able to meet others who had written books for non-
academic audiences pretty regularly. This allowed me to get some solid
advice about the entire process that lay ahead of me in terms of writing this
book. But for me, the most risky time – when I would truly be putting
myself out there – would be when I sent my proposal to an agent, who
could recommend my writing to a publisher or reject me in the blink of an
eye.
So who should you meet? Like me, some of you will need to meet
gatekeepers and other people who can make your journey towards ME+
possible. In addition, the responsibility for becoming known as a person
with particular skills or abilities lies with you. No one else can do (or will
do) this job for you. No one else should. Even if you are planning on
staying within your current organization, there is a lot of added value in
putting yourself out there and meeting new people. And if you are someone
who is going to build a new business, work in the gig economy, switch
industries or move to a new company, you absolutely need to be out there
becoming known for the value that you add.

You will progress much faster if you meet people outside your
normal circles.
 I am talking face-to-face discussions here, which can occur in person or
virtually. One of the big lessons of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 has to
be how the technology we have at our disposal allows us to build bridges in
the absence of palm-pressing contact.
Decades of research in economics shows that larger social networks
create more and better career opportunities.13 If you are an entrepreneur,
having a larger social network allows you to build your customer base more
quickly. You’ll have better access to talent that can enhance your business,
too. Whether it’s getting help with a one-off marketing initiative, hiring
someone who can create an app, or providing evidence that your product
actually works, you can use your network to find someone reliable to get
the job done. Meanwhile, if you are working in the gig economy and
looking for clients, having a wider network can help bring the clients to
you, allowing you to focus on your core business: finishing projects and
getting paid.
You should commit to paying deliberate attention to expanding your
external network at least once a month. But how do you go about meeting
these people in the first place? First, loop back to the activities that you
have identified your ME+ doing. Your external networking should give you
opportunities to engage in these activities, or expose you to individuals who
do them and are at the top of their game. Because you want to expand your
network, any group event that you attend needs to have time to socialize
before or after. This is a much easier task if you live in a big city, like
London or New York, where there are endless low-cost or free events. In
less densely populated areas, you may have to look a bit harder or be open
to a commute. The important thing is that you broker at least one mutually
beneficial relationship a month. This amounts to having a list of twelve new
external contacts by the end of year one.
Remember that when you are putting yourself out there and attending
talks and events, you will need to actually talk to people. If you are usually
not able to bring yourself to approach people and introduce yourself, try
arriving first so that you will have to speak to those who arrive second and
third.
A seminal lesson from behavioural science is that ego matters. Ego is
our conscious sense of our own self-importance. It causes us to behave in
ways that make us feel good about ourselves. Ideally, you will speak with
your new acquaintances in a way that makes them feel interested and good
about themselves. It is worth creating an elevator pitch that can be drawn
upon to help with these new interactions. Do ensure that the elevator pitch
is interesting, and more specifically that the importance of your personal
added value shines through. I have no idea how many times I have been
asked for advice, followed by a question as to whether I think what the
person is working on is important. This baffles me. If the person who is
selling the idea needs to ask that question, the answer must be ‘no’, right?
I do sympathize with those who do not actively want to network. Having
to talk to people when I am unsure of common ground can be draining. I
also find superficial conversations pretty boring. Thankfully, there is a
viable alternative. Identify people who are in a similar role to what you
want to do, and email or message them and ask to meet. For me, this is
much easier. The probability of rejection is larger (it is easier to ignore you
virtually than face-to-face), but you are less likely to internalize this
because email is less personal. As a rule of thumb, email is preferred for
contacts that you do not know yet, or where there are multiple people who
can answer your request for help.
When sending emails to new contacts, remember that the probability of
getting a positive response increases with the number of people you email.
So aim to email five people once a month, and resign yourself to the idea
that one acceptance is an overall win.
Once you have your meeting in the bag, decide on what you want to
cover. Ideally, this person will stay in your network, so understand that any
pull on their time should also be beneficial to them. Go prepared, knowing
the questions that you want to ask and any opportunities that you want to
explore.
Pull your head out from this book and send five emails right now. There’s
no time like the present!

INSIGHT 6: HONE ME+’S SKILLS VIA CONTINUOUS LEARNING

When preparing to write this book in 2018 I took to continuous learning
with rigour. This was easy to schedule, as I relied on nobody but myself. In
fact, I planned a continuous learning session for every working day. You
know what? On at least one occasion per week, I failed to show up. Why? I
am easily distracted, plagued by whatever and whoever is waving actively
for my attention on any particular day. I stop-start more often than I would
care to admit. But I never stop getting back on the horse when I fall off. On
days when I noticed I had not done any continuous learning, I would set
intentions and pull out material to work on so it was easily accessible the
next day. While it would have been better if I had always honoured my
commitment to show up, the simple act of recommitting for tomorrow was
enough to get me to the finish line in the end.
What continuous learning activities will you commit to today? Some of
the skills that you will have identified as necessary for ME+ will require
you to complete additional training, whether it is formal or informal. As this
is a medium-term expedition, I recommend avoiding signing on for
expensive tertiary education programmes. You don’t need a master’s degree
to get started. That can come later, once you are certain it is the right path
for you.
In the beginning, you should spend some time becoming familiar with
opportunities that are either free or low-cost. If your continuous learning
costs a fortune, your own budget will ensure it can never be continuous.
Alternatively you can try short courses or summer schools. Most major
institutions offer a wide variety of courses, ranging from regular evening
offerings to a couple of intensive weeks. There are also heaps of excellent
online options, allowing you to engage in continuous learning from the
comfort of your own home. Luckily, advances in technology – making it
cheap to record virtual offerings – mean this can often be done for free!
It is important to think about your learning as continuous, rather than
simply looking to pass an exam that suggests you have acquired a certain
skill. Continuous learning allows you to up your game and keep your skills
current and in demand. Of course, for certain people, getting a formal
qualification will be necessary (say, if you have decided to become a heart
surgeon or a lawyer), but for most of us, the routes to ME+ are diverse and
the paths are numerous.
Making continuous learning a regular part of your week – by leaning on
free or cheap resources – is a very scalable habit. For me, my morning
routine involves reading sections of current newspapers and magazines that
I enjoy (and some that I do not, so as to challenge my views and that
dreaded confirmation bias). I do this over a leisurely breakfast, to set the
right tone for the day. I do this even when I have a back-to-back day, too – I
just get up an hour earlier. I have even been known to read on winter
mornings, with a head torch and a muffin, during my ride on the way to the
airport. Alongside my morning reading routine, I listen to podcasts of
online courses on my commute or read non-fiction books.
Overall, your continuous learning should focus on advancing the
expertise that you have identified ME+ as having. The time you set aside
allows for a process (reading, viewing, listening or writing) which supports
the goal you want to achieve (acquiring new skills). Engaging in this
process will pay dividends if you practise it over the medium term. I
recommend devoting 80 per cent of your continuous learning time to
honing a key skill – with a view to becoming an expert – which allows
some leftover time to investigate other interests. Exploring other areas of
learning outside those that link directly to your future self will allow you to
be unexpectedly inspired. It also gives you scope to discover further
interests that you did not know you had.
But perhaps your responses to the ME+ activities and skills tables were a
bit lacklustre. You know for sure that you want a different future self, but
still do not know what you will be doing. How can you possibly engage in
continuous learning that propels you forward? How can you know what to
do? In this case, you need to cast a wider net, as you take some time to
identify your interests and ultimately your passion. Keeping your options
open allows you to discover new opportunities.
It is worth reflecting weekly on what you enjoyed about your continuous
learning because engaging in this process will help you discover what your
big-thinking goal is. Your objective should be to narrow your interests over
time, so you are writing the CV of an expert in your future role, with your
regular continuous learning becoming an established ‘no pain’ habit.
Make a commitment now that makes continuous learning an integral part
of your week. Commit to engaging on specific days and specific times,
setting reminders that nudge you to honour your new commitment.
Now, in the space below, write down one activity you’re going to do this
week to invest in your learning:

INSIGHT 7: LEARN BETTER BY ACHIEVING FLOW

Like most days, Monday 1 April 2019 started with me being distracted. It
feels like when I pick one thing to do, something else starts vying for my
attention. At the LSE I am too often distracted by coffees, lunches and solo
trips to the campus bookstore. So on that day I was working at home so I
could get meaningful work done, as it was the very first day I would be
working on this book as a commissioned author – I had just accepted an
offer from Penguin to be my publisher. This made me beyond happy, but
the downside was the happiness also brought a pressure which was now
worming its way into my brain.
I had committed to what seemed like an absurd delivery date. Having
spent sixteen months researching the book and writing a proposal, I would
now need to complete a first draft of the project in a third of that time. It felt
impossible, but on that first day of writing I did come prepared: I was
surrounded by notebooks filled with ideas for the content of each chapter;
my desk had been cleared to ensure minimal distractions; I had tea, water
and various snacks to prevent me breaking my concentration to satisfy a
basic urge.
But there was no concentration. The clock moved from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.,
9 a.m. to 10 a.m. … lunchtime came and went, and then at about 2.45 p.m. I
finally achieved flow.

Flow happens when you become immersed in what you are

doing and are ultra-productive. Time seems to fly. As
described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a
mental state that is experienced when you are engaged in
continuous learning activities that are challenging enough to
fully engross you. The good news is that if you achieve flow
you will enjoy a feeling of great joy and satisfaction. The other
states recognized by Csikszentmihalyi are anxiety, apathy,
arousal, boredom, control, relaxation and worry. None of
these states promotes optimal learning, but in my experience
you have to go through at least one in a session to get to the
flow state. With practice, a period of ninety minutes should
allow for both the transition into flow and some productive
work to be done. Of course, sometimes you may be more
distracted than usual. On those days, it may not happen for
you. Don’t beat yourself up about it, just show up for yourself
on another occasion as soon as you can.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes the 10,000-Hour Rule. To

achieve a high level of expertise, a person must practise for around 10,000
hours. Of course, this is an average – some of us will require fewer hours
and others more. The more important point is that the practice must be done
the right way. And the right way is with flow.
This aligns with the messages from Anders Ericsson, a Swedish
psychologist, who insists that practice is deliberate. You need to be in a
zone where there are no distractions, so you can achieve flow. Ericsson also
maintains that if you manage to get into the zone, you can expect to be tired
afterwards. Why? Because you have been focusing so intensely it saps your
energy. Therefore, ninety minutes is about all you can achieve in a session,
regardless of how much free time you have.
We are all different in regards to when in the day it is easier to find flow.
I am best first thing in the morning (7–10 a.m.) and later in the evening
(after 10 p.m.). But I can only do one or the other in a given day. If you are
flexible, it is worth experimenting with different times of the day for your
ninety-minute session. This allows you to discover when the optimal time is
for your own flow.
It is also worth setting aside a block of time for what I will call
‘distracted learning’. This is continuous learning but with a lower level of
focus, so you can multitask. Think listening to a podcast while on the
treadmill or cooking, or reading while listening to music on your commute.
Learning in this way has great benefits. It is how I managed to read 100+
books in 2018. You zone in on and remember items that interest you, and
these can be saved for later if you wish to go deeper. It also helps build the
narrative that you are a continuous learner. By engaging in distracted
learning regularly, you are helping ingrain a new routine in your daily life.
If repeated enough times as a small step, it becomes a habit. A new status
quo emerges.

INSIGHT 8: AUDIT PROGRESS TO ENSURE SUCCESS

To have a first draft of this book written by the end of September, I wrote
regularly and often. Over the summer I increased the intensity, and had a
planned writing schedule for each day to ensure I would not be tardy. Guess
what? I rarely made my own deadlines each day, but my progress was
salient – in other words, clear and noticeable – and I could rejig my
schedule so I kept to the same overall timeline. Getting in the habit of
achieving flow as I immersed myself in the project meant I was always able
to catch up. I managed to finish on time.
 It is essential to make your progress salient by auditing the
activities you are doing and the milestones you are reaching.

To be effective in your journey and stay the course, you need to monitor
your ongoing efforts. Set aside an hour a week to log what you have done
over the last seven days. This is also a good time to set intentions for the
week ahead. You should do this type of monitoring for your continuous
learning, as well as your various networking efforts.
Monitoring ensures that you are fully engaged in the processes that will
lead to ME+ being realized. It also serves as a reminder of the benefits you
are accruing as you go. When I have had a particularly good week engaging
in my processes, I feel a sort of smug satisfaction at my accomplishments.
This feeling is likely driven by the fact that I have shown up for myself.
The following is a template for monitoring your activities, with some
examples of how you might fill it in below:

Last week I …

The activity I did last week helped me move towards my

goal by …

When engaging in this activity, I felt …

Next week I will …

The activity I will do next week will help me …

This template can be used to monitor continuous learning:

 Last week I …

Completed session four of my online masterclass on

Saturday.

The activity I did last week helped me move towards my

goal by …

Helping me to understand balance sheets and income

statements, a skill I need to be a responsible business owner.

When engaging in this activity, I felt …

Challenged, at times distracted, other times relieved when

simple concepts became clearer to me.

Next week I will …

Complete session five of my online masterclass on Saturday.

The activity I will do next week will help me …

Understand cash flows and tax shields, a skill I need to be a

responsible business owner.

This template can also be used to monitor networking attempts on the job
and out and about:
 Last week I …

Compiled a list of twenty people who are doing the job I will
do soon(ish).

The activity I did last week helped me move towards my

goal by …

Giving me a list of potential mentors who can advise me

about the various pathways to my new role.

When engaging in this activity, I felt …

It was tedious, but after completing the task I felt organized

and hopeful.

Next week I will …

Carve out two hours on Tuesday evening to send emails to

my list of potential mentors.

The activity I will do next week will help me …

Secure one-on-one meetings with potential mentors. This will

increase my network, and allow me to pick their brains about
my new endeavour.

In the examples above, I am suggesting you reflect on the previous week’s

activities and explicitly recognize how these activities relate to your big-
thinking goal. This serves to emphasize the benefits of each activity, and
allows you to better visualize ME+. I want you to view ME+ as a real
person who is worth your time, empathy and effort. By linking activities to
your ME+, the point of the activities is made clear to you, helping you
persevere even when life throws you a curveball.
The template also asks you to document how you felt when you engaged
in each activity. Whether you are someone who is 100 per cent sure about
who their future self is, or someone who needs to figure this out along the
way, I strongly recommend you keep track of these feelings. This will allow
you to more easily identify what you enjoy doing. It may sound like a
redundant exercise, but as we’ve already seen, personal narratives are
incredibly strong. They may convince you that you like an activity, even if
it does not serve you well. Similarly, you may persuade yourself that you
enjoy doing something beneficial that at first you hated.
It is worth noting here that ‘liking’ an activity is not binary. For example,
in my day job as an academic, I love engaging with industry once a week. I
always enjoy meeting non-academic colleagues, who often have a much
faster approach to work than my fellow academics, and on this one day I
can give my all to the occasion. Afterwards, I am on a high and am excited
to move projects forward. However, if I do this more than once a week, I
feel drained. The same goes for social events, and for speaking to academic
audiences. For one day of the week I am able to be an extrovert, and absorb
energy from the new people I meet and share ideas with. But on the
remaining days I am an introvert, and do better on my own or engaging in
meetings remotely. I need to recharge.
But I only realized all this by auditing how various activities were
making me feel. Now I tailor the activities I choose to engage in to account
for these preferences.
The monitoring template also gives you an opportunity to set intentions
for the week ahead. By doing this, you are leveraging salience bias to your
advantage.

Salience bias refers to the tendency of us mortals to give our

attention to activities that are prominent and at the forefront of
our minds.

By setting intentions – and linking those intentions to their added value

in terms of your big-thinking goal – the activities that need to be done stay
at the forefront of your mind. You are therefore more likely to complete
them. The weekly ritual of setting intentions makes drawing attention to the
activities of the week ahead a habit, and eventually this is done
unconsciously as part of your routine.
Notice that the examples given above specify what the activity is (for
example, ‘session four in an online class’, or ‘sending five emails’) and
exactly when it will be carried out (the day of the week). This serves to put
clear boundaries around an activity so that you know when to do it and
when it is done. It is important not to pull the wool over your own eyes,
which is easy to do if you set vague intentions to engage in ‘reading’ or
‘online learning’. When there are no set end points or specific levels of
commitment, it is too easy to persuade yourself that you’ve done something
without actually having done it.
But please do not worry about non-compliance over the short term. If you
miss a few weeks, just reflect on what sent you off track. Ask yourself if
your old narratives are the culprit. Then continue with the process. The
most important thing is that you persevere.

INSIGHT 9: MINIMUM NINETY-MINUTE WEEKLY COMMITMENT

So what is the minimum commitment you should put in to get started on
these activities? I suggest at least one session of ninety minutes per week.
The anecdotes describing my book-writing process may offer some
reassurance for those of you who need convincing that a large project can
be completed in a medium-term window once there is focus. However, for
those of you who feel you have no work–life balance already, you may be
feeling grumpy about my suggestion that you need to engage in activities
regularly. You probably realize, quite rightly, that you cannot commit to the
same level of intensity as I did in the summer of 2019.
You have no time. I get it. Chapter 3 is written entirely with your
concerns at the forefront of my mind.
If you already feel overwhelmed, just stick with the commitment that you
will set aside ninety minutes a week for ME+ related activities. If this is not
possible during the working week, do it at the weekend. This is an
investment in your own future – it is okay that it encroaches on some
leisure time.
A ninety-minute commitment is small enough that it should not
overwhelm you. But if you devote it to continuous learning it is also long
enough for you to find flow and begin a virtuous cycle that moves you
forward. And it is also sufficient time to attend a networking event, or
spend some time with a colleague or a new acquaintance.
Committing to one time-block of ninety minutes ensures that you do
something substantive each week, and allows you to see clear progress.

INSIGHT 10: MANAGE FLESH-AND-BLOOD OBSTACLES

They say when you write a book there is a risk that the only people who
will read it are your friends and family. Just in case this ends up being my
future (success is a product of talent, effort and luck after all), it is probably
best if I don’t bash my core audience right now.
But one of the obstacles you may face is the reaction of friends, families
and co-workers to the changes that you want to make. Perhaps some key
people in your life engage in activities that are not aligned with your big-
thinking goal. Maybe you have enjoyed engaging in activities with your
loved ones that do not serve ME+. This might include drinking in the
evenings, to the extent that it affects your next day’s performance, or
watching so much TV that it crowds out continuous learning, or eating so
much sugary food you experience brain fog. All of these activities are fine
once a month, or even once a week, but if done to excess they prevent
investments in ME+.
Of course, they also give you instant gratification and are fun. For your
companions, it may seem like you have ruined a very nice set-up when you
announce that you are no longer partaking. In a sense, you have. But you
are striving for a longer-term purpose, and some immediate benefits need to
be sacrificed.
Managing the negative reactions of others is key. My advice is to give
them certainty. If you plan on quitting the activity altogether, you need to let
them know. If you plan to still engage, but on a less regular basis, give them
definite dates. Keep your promises and show up on time with a smile on
your face. If there are any reactionary guilt trips, do not internalize them.
Anti-role models are people who bring you down. When you leave an
interaction with them, you feel lower than when it began. They may take
every opportunity to point out that the odds are stacked against you. They
may say things like, ‘People like you (us) do not get ahead’ or
‘Opportunities are for people who are richer/smarter/look different’ or
‘You’re certainly getting notions about yourself’. Of course, these messages
are always most effective when they are delivered by those who are closest
to you.
The result of these sorts of conversation is that your harmful personal
narratives get fed. It is best to avoid conversing about your small steps and
big thinking with negative people when at all possible. Stick to your path,
and give as little detail as possible about what you have been up to. When it
all works out you can let them know over a celebratory glass of champagne.
(Cheers!)
To balance out the anti-role models who may be in your life it is
important to search for role models specific to your journey.

Everyone needs support, including ME+.

Role models motivate. They give their time to help you find the best way
forward when faced with an obstacle. There are no guilt trips. When you are
with a positive role model, you can reveal your future self fully. You can be
vulnerable.
Ideally, you will have at least one positive role model who understands
what you are trying to achieve. If such a person is not already in your life,
you should take the process of finding them seriously. This may be
achieved through your commitments to ‘on the job’ or ‘putting yourself out
there’. I have seen great success when people approach the search for a
positive role model as they would for a romantic partner. Reflecting on the
attributes that you would like in this person can bear fruit. For example, will
you need someone who listens and consoles you? Or should your role
model push you to toughen up? Of course, the beauty of role models is that
there is no need for monogamy. If you are lucky, you will have multiple
people who offer a variety of perspectives for all seasons.

READY, STEADY, GO
Your journey is going to take years. This is a long time. In this window it
really is possible to transform your work set-up from lacklustre to
spectacular – you just need commitment and perseverance. Some of you
will only be aiming for moderate change, and that is okay, too. Having a
purposeful plan will help you get there. If you stick to the recommendations
in this chapter, the commitments you will make are not so significant that
they will disrupt your life in the short term, but they will pay great
dividends in the long run.
Let’s take a moment and recap the behavioural science insights that will
help you create your big-thinking goal and identify the small steps required
to achieve it …
INSIGHT 1: WHAT IS ME+ DOING DAILY?
Start by identifying the things you enjoy doing currently, or
things that you think you would enjoy doing, and allow these
to shape your ideas as you think big.

INSIGHT 2: WHAT SKILL SET DOES ME+ POSSESS?

Define the skills that you need to acquire for ME+. Chances
are you will need to advance your current skill set or hone
new skills.

INSIGHT 3: GETTING THE SKILLS ME+ NEEDS

Make activities that relate to ME+’s overall goal a habit, so
that you engage in them automatically.

INSIGHT 4: HONE ME+’S SKILLS ON THE JOB

Identify and commit to activities you can do on the job which
will help move you forward. Make a commitment to engage in
one or more of these activities in the coming month.

INSIGHT 5: HONE ME+’S SKILLS BY PUTTING

YOURSELF OUT THERE
Progress faster by meeting people outside your normal
circles. Make a commitment to engage in one or more
activities that expand your network in the coming month.

INSIGHT 6: HONE ME+’S SKILLS VIA CONTINUOUS

LEARNING
Identify continuous learning opportunities. Ensure that you set
aside time weekly to embed continuous learning as part of
your usual routine.

INSIGHT 7: LEARN BETTER BY ACHIEVING FLOW

When engaging in continuous learning, pay attention to the
context and circumstances that allow you to achieve flow.
Replicate these in future continuous learning sessions.

INSIGHT 8: AUDIT PROGRESS TO ENSURE SUCCESS

 Set aside an hour each week to monitor your progress. Use
this time to set intentions for the next week.

INSIGHT 9: MINIMUM NINETY-MINUTE WEEKLY

COMMITMENT
Commit to, at minimum, a ninety-minute block of targeted
activities.

INSIGHT 10: MANAGE FLESH-AND-BLOOD OBSTACLES

Guard your plans from family or friends who may not
appreciate your efforts to change. Find positive role models.

The weekly commitments you have made while reading this chapter
translate directly to the processes you need to engage in to reach your big-
thinking goal. By auditing how you feel in each activity weekly, you will
have information on how much happiness you got out of taking a particular
small step. Because the commitments are small, your life is not disrupted.
Your narratives should not be telling you to stop.

Happy goal-setting!
Before we move on, make sure that you:
Identify the narratives that are holding back your ability to
think big, and set in place processes to change them.
Work through the behavioural science insights one by one.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER

1 Confirmation bias: Refers to favouring information that

confirms pre-existing beliefs.

2 Future self: A visualization of who you will be in the future.

People often think about their future self in a way that
evokes empathy and promotes investment in long-term
gains.

3 System 1 and System 2: When we make System 1

decisions they are fast, instinctive and on autopilot; in
contrast, System 2 is more deliberative.

4 Ben Franklin effect: When someone does a favour for

another person, they are more likely to do another favour
for them next time around, and this effect is stronger than if
they had received a favour from that person.

5 Framing: How information or choices are presented with

respect to their positive and negative aspects causes
changes in their relative attractiveness.
 CHAP T E R 3

Time

‘It’s pretty shocking, Gillian. They ended up with HIV from the hospital –
the place that’s supposed to make you well. I told you, there’s nothing good
that comes from needles,’ I leaned across and whispered to my friend. We
were wrapping up our mock (practice) Irish exam. It was 1997, and I was in
my final year of secondary school in Ireland.
‘What in God’s name are you talking about the Hepatitis C and HIV
tribunal for?’ she replied. ‘That was a hard exam. I still don’t think I’ll ever
understand the modh coinníollach.’1
Thump. Mrs Buckley interrupted my thoughts, banging her hand on my
desk. I rubbed my temple, lamenting the inevitable before it even happened.
‘Grace Lordan! You cannot confer during an examination at this school. I
am cancelling your right to results on your mock exams. Tell your mother
that I want to see her.’
‘My mother, Miss?’ I questioned, despite Gillian’s pleading eyes telling
me to shut up. ‘Why not my father? Isn’t that a bit sexist? You know, I read
recently that we tend to see mothers as both caregivers and disciplinarians
due to a …’
As I rambled on, I could see Mrs Buckley’s eyes bulging bigger and
bigger. I would bet my morning coffee that she would have preferred to
whack me upside the head in that moment, and she presumably only chose
six weeks of Friday detention because flexing her ruler had been deemed
socially unacceptable in Ireland by that time.
I can’t recall why the Hepatitis C and HIV tribunal popped into my head
that day, but that kind of random thought is common for those of us who are
easily distracted or prone to procrastination.
Wandering thoughts aren’t helpful when you are trying to accelerate your
life. They don’t just cause lapses of concentration at moments when you
need your performance to be at its peak (like exams, important meetings,
interviews, etc.); they can also cause you to get distracted by entirely
different activities, like binge-watching TV or staying out too long
socializing with friends – as your real priorities slip through your fingers.

Have you ever planned an ultra-productive day, only to finish

it with nothing to show?

Time is your most precious resource. You cannot get it back, you cannot
buy more, and in today’s world there are oodles of things that grab at it
indiscriminately. Fighting against distraction and procrastination is an
ongoing commitment. You will lose battles, but with perseverance you can
ultimately win the war.
I know this is hard from bitter experience. During my school years I was
shouted at, pleaded with, told to sit at the back of the class and sent outside
the class for being distracted, distracting others and distracting the teacher,
and this happened too many times to count. No drugs, alcohol, sex, or
smoking in the toilets for me. My crime was not being able to pay attention.
Mrs Buckley was particularly grating for me. In the parent–teacher meeting
right before my Leaving Certificate (the equivalent to A levels in the UK),
she told my parents I was unlikely to get in to any tertiary education, let
alone university. My mum was gutted. And yet I am now an associate
professor at a prestigious international university. Was Mrs Buckley just a
terrible judge of character?
Mrs Buckley was certainly a royal pain in my derrière. However, it needs
to be emphasized that she had a valid perspective. My ability to study was
poor because of the limits of my attention. Even though I wanted to go to
university when I finished school, I was not on any kind of visible pathway
towards doing so. It is easy to have ambitions. Figuring out how to make
them a reality is the hard part. This involves hard work and a re-
prioritization of how you spend your time.
So how did I end up scoring high enough in my Leaving Certificate to
study computer science at my local university? All of it is owed to my
doting mum, Rita. In the year running up to my exams, Mum quizzed me
every morning on my daily study schedule. This schedule was written down
the evening before, and stuck up over my desk in my bedroom study area.
Timetables and check-ins served to make salient the activities that I was
actually meant to be doing on a daily basis. This kept the activities in the
forefront of my mind, and gave me the best chance of success. Back then,
my mum did the hard work for me. She put simple structures in place that
meant that I stuck to my plan, studied and ended up at university.
In the adult world, you need to do this for yourself. You need to create
structures and systems that make sure you stay on track. Increasing the odds
of succeeding is your responsibility.

TIME IS FINITE
To stick to the plan you have imagined for yourself, it is pretty obvious that
you need time. But time is a finite resource. I can’t think of one person I
know who doesn’t always feel busy. Chances are you would say the same if
we ever met over a cup of coffee. And I would probably have had to wait
two weeks for you to make the time to meet me.
Why is everyone so time-poor? The majority of us simply feel busy
because – from the moment we wake up – our time is gobbled up by useful
and not-so-useful activities. This happens if you do not pay attention to
time. The first step, then, is to identify where there is time in your current
schedule that can be shifted from not-so-useful activities to your big-
thinking plan.
Have you already figured out how you can make time to realize ME+?
Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. That’s the easy part. Sticking to the
‘doing’ part of it is what is hard.
Identifying where the time will come from to engage in your small steps
each week is like a dieter identifying where in their daily food intake they
will reduce calories. Okay, that’s easy, I won’t eat all those jam doughnuts.
What’s the hard part? Not eating the jam doughnuts.
What’s the really hard part? Not eating the doughnuts when you are tired,
stressed – or, on the other hand, when you’ve had good news and fancy
treating yourself.
It’s the same thing for anybody who has ever decided to take up running.
It is easy to write a plan to take you from couch to 5K. Run ten minutes,
then walk for ten minutes on the first day; run fifteen minutes, walk five
minutes on another day … It’s only twenty minutes a day, you tell yourself,
so how hard can it be? But fast-forward to run number five, and you’re tired
and a bit achy as you lace up your trainers that are still wet from yesterday’s
rain …
 Would going back to bed for half an hour really be so bad?
Having the intention to take up running is easy. Putting a note in your
diary of all the runs you’re going to do before the big race is easy. Even
doing the first run is usually pretty easy. There’s a novelty to it. But not
missing a single training session for three months is hard. Showing up
regularly to execute a plan is where people fall down.
So let’s do the easy bit first: figuring out where you will pull the time for
your small steps. And after that we can get serious about using behavioural
science to help you stay the distance. I’ll highlight ten behavioural science
insights you can draw on immediately, to develop the good habit of
regularly committing time to your new journey.

FINDING TIME IS EASY

Once a week, let’s say every Sunday evening so that you can look ahead,
you will set intentions for the next seven days. You’ll allocate ninety
minutes here or three hours there for the activities you’ve identified as
important for your journey to ME+ (recall the activities you committed to in
Chapter 2), just as you might list how you will devote your minutes of
training in a couch-to-5K training plan.
Of course, you will need to find time in your already manic schedule to
engage in these processes. We are all busy, but what is the biggest obstacle
that stands in our way to find this time? Time-inconsistent preferences.

What are time-inconsistent preferences? This is behavioural

science speak for the fact that most of us don’t do things that
are in our long-term interests often enough because we lack
self-control.
Self-control problems need tackling head-on when dealing
with intertemporal choices. What is an intertemporal
choice? It means you are choosing between immediate
gratification and engaging in activities where the gains are a
long way in the future, but the costs are felt today.
To put it simply: most of us are unlikely to choose to spend
three hours writing our novel or learning Mandarin, when we
could be spending that time in the pub with our friends, or
watching TV.
If you are lucky, you will get instant gratification from the small steps you
are taking to get you to your big-thinking goal. Maybe you love writing
your novel or learning a new language, and every time you put effort into
doing so you gain immediate satisfaction from achieving that immersive
flow state. However, the major gains of these activities will still be reaped
at some time in the future – your first royalty statement, say, or when you’re
chatting away to your new colleagues in Beijing at a level that goes beyond
‘pass the salt’.
In contrast, there are many activities where the fun is delivered
immediately and the costs come later. In behavioural science, these are
called ‘sins’ or ‘bads’, but in this book I’m going to call them time-sinkers.
Time-sinkers include binge-drinking, couch-potatoing, and endless
engagement in online social networks. As well as being time-sinkers, these
activities can have long-term costs in terms of your personal health.2 Time-
sinkers also include online shopping and gambling – as well as being time-
sinkers, these activities will increase the cost of your next credit card bill.
Even emailing, being in pointless meetings and dealing with office politics
take away time now that you could have spent on more worthwhile
activities.

Your small steps shouldn’t suck time from your health or your
family or the things you do to relax.

The point of taking a medium-term horizon is to allow you to still go

running, be a good friend, or get a Thai massage to loosen your knotted
neck. Your small steps need to work around life-enhancing things you do
day-to-day. Rather, this chapter is focused on reducing your time-sinkers.

TIME AUDITS
Every year, the HMRC in the UK (or the IRS in the US) inspects people’s
income to ensure they are paying an appropriate amount of tax. A time
audit is when you inspect how you spend the hours and minutes of a regular
day. It allows you to see how your plans match what actually happened.
Commit to doing a time audit over the next seven days. I would suggest
breaking each day into fifteen-minute intervals, to allow a level of detail
that makes time-sinkers obvious.
 A time-sinker is something that can (and should) be culled, avoided or
cut down. Highlighting the time-sinkers with a neon marker in your audit
can make it easier for you to see where you are unwisely sinking your time.

TIME-SINKERS
So what are your biggest time-sinkers? For me, they are pointless meetings,
time spent checking and responding to unnecessary emails, and binge-
watching box sets. I’m going to focus on each in turn and show you how
much time I used to spend doing them, so that you can work out what your
own time-sinkers are and how to combat them.
I committed to avoiding these time-sinkers partially by creating a
structure that gave me the best possible chance of sticking to my plan.
My time-sinkers
What: Pointless meetings where I am clearly not needed and
don’t add value

• Weekly time-cost: 7 hours.

• Commit to save: 4 hours (don’t want colleagues to think I
am dead, so I should show up sometimes).
• How: Send polite apologies that give comments on the
papers for the meeting, with the warmest of wishes. If no
paper has been prepared for the meeting, just don’t show
up. If the organizers couldn’t care less about the meeting,
why would I?

What: Time spent checking and responding to unnecessary

emails

• Weekly time-cost: Hard to estimate as checking emails is

an automatic habit. I’m ashamed to say I am addicted, and
sometimes the number of times I unconsciously check my
email in an hour is in the double digits.
• Commit to save: 80 per cent of whatever the time-cost is.3
• How: Remove email from my desktop and phone, as this is
where I tend to check the most absent-mindedly. Restrict
emailing to my iPad. This will cause my unconscious mind
to no longer associate email-checking with my desktop and
phone. Further, restrict my emailing to just after lunch and
before I sign off for the evening. Remind myself I am not a
heart surgeon and no one will die if I don’t ping-pong a
response to their email.4

What: Binge-watching boxsets, while also mindlessly surfing

the internet on my phone

• Weekly time-cost: 1.5 hours each evening, plus about 5

hours in total across Saturday and Sunday.
• Commit to save: 6 hours in total.
 • How: Okay, this was a hard one for me because it is also
how I unwind. And for that reason, unlike endlessly
checking emails or going to stupid meetings, I didn’t want to
totally get rid of my boxset addiction. However, by making
the decision to cut down, I changed the habit from mindless
watching to watching one full-length movie, or two episodes
of a series per night. I also put all of my devices out of the
room, so I no longer surf the internet while watching TV –
meaning I watch TV with more focus and enjoy it more.
Thanks to being able to easily cancel and restart contracts
on Apple TV, Now TV, Netflix and Amazon (in behavioural
science we call being able to cancel so easily ‘low levels of
sludge’), I now rotate the TV subscriptions so I have much
more variation in what I watch. And this ‘intentional
watching’ has had a very positive knock-on effect on my
sleep quality.

Overall, changing the time I devoted to two of my time-sinkers gave me at

least ten hours per week, plus a conservative ten hours (and I mean really
conservative!) from changing up my emailing habits. Whoop! That’s twenty
hours a week to devote to progressing my big-thinking journey. People
always say there aren’t enough days in the week, but doing this practically
gave me a whole extra day! With fifty-two weeks in a year, over one year,
this is 1,040 hours! Over five years this would be 5,200 hours!!! Imagine
how much better off I’ll be from spending 5,200 more hours on fulfilling
my ambitions over the next five years?
Identify your own three biggest time sinkers now …

Time-sinker 1
What:
Weekly time-cost:
Commit to save:
How?

Time-sinker 2
What:
Weekly time-cost:
Commit to save:
How?

Time-sinker 3
What:
Weekly time-cost:
Commit to save:
How?

BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE INSIGHTS

In Chapter 2, you set intentions for activities related to your medium-term
journey. You have now identified time-sinkers via a time audit, which gives
you time back to actually do the small steps that will allow you to realize
your big-thinking goal.
So what else is standing in the way of your success? Getting distracted by
things that are more fun or entertaining in the moment? Letting your mind
wander from your core objectives because of intrusions in your mailbox, or
random thoughts?
Managing to persevere when the small steps require tasks that are hard,
or when external events dent your mojo – this is where the real work is. The
truth is that sticking to your plans will be hard. Just showing up regularly
for the small steps takes self-discipline. In fact, it requires a level of self-
discipline that most of us do not have in plentiful supply.
There will be times when the work needed to attain your goal is tedious
and boring. There will be times when you can’t join your friend for that
Aperol spritz, or go to a movie with your partner. But this is the path that
you have chosen to get your desired life. Only you can make it happen.
Don’t let your time-sinkers drag you down.
But we are not necessarily destined to choose instant gratification every
time. As I hope I’ve made clear, I am easily distracted and find it very hard
to stay on track. But you’re reading a book that took lots of time. It was
very much a medium-term journey that required me initially to think big
and later take very regular small steps to complete it.
Behavioural science has taught me that I can overcome distractions and
stay on track by acknowledging the parts of me that cause me to become
distracted, and by putting structures in place to safeguard me from myself. I
outline these structures below – they are the very best insights that
behavioural science has to offer to ensure you avoid your time-sinkers, take
regular small steps and reach your desired goal. They are also easy to do,
and either cheap or free to implement.
While each behavioural science insight will help some of you, they will
not necessarily help every reader. You are all unique and special, and
different things work for different people. I would still encourage you to try
the insights, one by one. This allows you to consciously evaluate the
success of each for you personally. If it works for you, keep doing it. If you
see no benefits after one week, don’t bother with it any more and move on
to the next insight. You don’t have to do them in order, either; go with what
appeals most.
This is called trial-and-error learning. You keep what works and discard
the rest. I have carried out trial-and-error learning with great success. It has
helped me manage my own attention span (or lack of) and therefore my
time. I regularly treat myself like a behavioural science experiment. Okay,
so it sounds a little odd, but the basic idea is that I take an insight from
behavioural science and apply it to myself. I then sit down after seven days
and assess if the change I made actually altered my behaviour in a direction
I want. If it did, I continue with the change, monitoring how it affects my
behaviour week to week, until it stops working. At this point I have
adapted. The novelty has worn off. So I try something else.
If you keep an open mind, you may be surprised at what works for you.
Personalizing the interventions gives you a far greater chance of success,
and different things work for different people.5 Trial-and-error learning
means you simply stop doing the techniques that give you zero gains (or
worse, distract you!) and stick with those that provide benefits.
There is an old saying that suggests we all end up becoming like our
parents eventually. By regularly adopting behavioural science insights, I
essentially became a version of my Irish mammy – intent on steering her
wayward child safely to university. I intentionally steward my distracted
self over the medium term to ensure that I fulfil meaningful medium-term
goals, like completing this book. By the end of this chapter I want you to be
in the same position: keeping yourself on the right track for success.
Out of the ten behavioural science insights I describe, I want you to pick
the most appealing one now and integrate it into your life tomorrow. It is
also worth journaling this entire process.
 Learning what works for you is a journey of self-discovery in
itself.

INSIGHT 1: REBALANCING IMMEDIATE COSTS AND BENEFITS

The problem with having Mrs Buckley refuse to give me the grades of my
mock examination meant that uncertainty around how I would actually
perform loomed large over the next six months. Combined with the fact that
all signs seemed to point to me being doomed to failure, my mum doubled
down in her efforts to put me on the right track for success. Well aware of
the fact that any gains her daughter might get from university were in the
future, she set about ensuring that the costs and benefits of me devoting
time to study in the present day were rebalanced to make me more likely to
study.
There is a side look that only an Irish mammy can give that lets her child
know she will not be won over. Worse still, a tirade of nagging will ensue if
this look is not respected. I received that side look many times while
studying for my Leaving Cert Examination. I was also subjected to plentiful
nagging. These were palpable costs of bad behaviour, which in my case was
not showing up for my daily study sessions.
With her side look, my mother was bringing the costs of not studying into
the present. The very real and immediate cost of nagging outweighed the
immediate benefit of watching TV or engaging in some equally frivolous
activity. This is what a behavioural scientist would call a stick. Like a real
stick, it has the ability to poke you in a particular direction in a manner that
is unpleasant.
But my mother wouldn’t just nag, she would also coax and praise. ‘I’m
so proud of you, Grace,’ she would say. ‘I know it’s a bit tedious but it’ll be
over soon. How about a cup of tea and some chocolate-covered
marshmallows?’ Along with the kind words, those yummy marshmallows
served to give my study session a benefit NOW, which helped to keep me
willingly sitting at my desk.
This tactic is what a behavioural scientist would call a carrot. It’s when
you receive immediate gratification, thereby giving you an incentive to
engage in a particular behaviour now that has the potential to also enhance
your life in the future.
Mum provided plenty of variety in her carrot-giving: wholesome and
comforting foods; good company during my breaks; movie rentals in the
evenings to unwind; and a variety of study treats as rewards on my best-
performance days (ranging from nice stationery to vouchers for my
favourite shops).
Overall, Mum used a carrot (incentive) and stick (punishment) method. I
needed Mum’s help desperately at that time, as aside from my own
tendency to chase dustballs with my brain, my school did not have the best
record for students making it to university – so I didn’t even have peer
effects (the positive influence of my peers) helping me to get better
grades.6 The odds were against me, and I had to show up and study hard if
I was going to tilt them back in my favour. I would later realize that there
are great mammies all over the world who should be commended for the
social mobility of their children against all odds. Many of these mammies
instinctively leverage carrots and sticks to help their children fulfil their
goals.
Today, when I am working towards something that has benefits that are
uncertain and far in the future, but the costs to my leisure time are in the
present and very obvious, I still rely on putting structures in place that alter
the immediate benefits and costs.

To begin creating your own carrots and sticks, ask yourself

this one question: ‘How can I lower the immediate costs and
increase the immediate benefits of the small steps I need to
take?’

You are essentially asking yourself how you can make the activities
related to your big-thinking goal (which you identified in Chapter 2) more
appealing now. A classic example relates to someone who wants to exercise
in the mornings but always hits the snooze button on their alarm. How can
they make it easier to engage in their planned behaviour?
They can put their alarm clock on the other side of the room, so they
have to get up to turn it off. They could then leave their runners and
workout gear next to their alarm, so they can get dressed quickly.
How does this help? Well, the alarm clock being further away serves to
increase the cost of staying in bed (who wants to lie there with an alarm
going off?) and simultaneously reduces the benefits of going back to bed
once the person is up (that lovely dozy feeling has begun to wear off).
Meanwhile, readily available exercise gear lowers the cost of getting ready.
 Making small differences to the costs and benefits of the new
habits (small steps) you are trying to adopt can have a
disproportionately positive effect on the likelihood that you
stay on track. For example:

Distracted by email and social media while engaging in

continuous learning? Try removing email and internet
access from your immediate working environment, and
giving yourself an offline space to work in. Increasing the
effort needed to go online increases the cost of this
activity NOW, and subsequently makes you much less
likely to do it.
Flaking on networking events because you’re too tired?
Give yourself an incentive to attend an event once a
month by scheduling an indulgence the following
evening. This could be a meal out with friends or a
relaxing night in with a takeaway and a movie. This
incentive serves to increase the benefits of attending the
event in the immediate term, and may allow you to push
through any fatigue barriers.

INSIGHT 2: CULTIVATE SELF-BELIEF

‘You can be anything you want, Grace. What that will be is entirely up to
you. There are no limits once you regularly apply yourself. You’re smart as
a whip. I believe in you,’ my mum said to me exactly three months before I
sat my Leaving Cert.
I was very sceptical of this at the time. I can see myself sat at my desk on
a rainy day in 1997, rolling my eyes to indicate that I had heard the message
but it hadn’t landed … yet. I saw myself as completely ordinary. Round
about average. I certainly didn’t think there were no limits to what I could
be. For my teenage self, authentic self-belief was in very short supply.
However, in the absence of self-belief, having someone else who believes in
you can be invaluable.
Does it make a difference if someone believes if you are a high performer
or a low performer academically? Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal
and school principal Lenore Jacobson carried out a landmark study in 1968
that investigated how a teacher’s belief in a student’s ability would shape
the child’s entire future.
They administered a test to elementary school kids, who were attending
school just south of San Francisco, that would identify late bloomers
(children who would reveal themselves to be talented in the future). The test
was said to allow Rosenthal and Jacobson to point to children who, despite
not showing the usual signs of being excellent students, were expected to
emerge as being innately brilliant soon-ish. The children the test identified
as late bloomers were made known to their teachers.
What happened next? The teachers started to treat the children identified
as late bloomers differently because of positive expectations. This became
known as the Pygmalion effect. What is more, at the end of the year, they
tested the students’ academic ability again, and the results showed a big
difference between the gains of those earmarked for greatness and the rest
of the students. So what did this mean? The assessment they’d administered
had predicted the late bloomers perfectly? Well, not quite …
The students they had identified as late-blooming top performers had
been randomly selected. Basically drawn from a hat. They were as likely to
be top performers as low. The selection process had no relationship at all to
academic chops or test-taking capabilities. Rather, the experiment
emphasized that a teacher’s belief in the ability of certain students was a
self-fulfilling prophecy: the students rose to the teacher’s expectations. It
wasn’t an innate ability that gave those children the edge. Rather, the
teacher gave the students identified as late bloomers more attention because
they believed in their potential. As they did so, the students’ effort increased
and this translated into better grades.
When embarking on any medium-term plan, cultivating self-belief pays
dividends. Why? If you believe in yourself, you will also hold a belief that
you can realize your big-thinking goal, and gain access to all the associated
benefits. The certainty that you can do it could be the link you need NOW
to ensure that you show up for your daily activities. You can generate your
own self-fulfilling prophecy or Pygmalion effect.
So how can you cultivate self-belief?
Regularly remind yourself that you can change your own skills and other
characteristics with sustained effort. These things are malleable. It sounds
oversimplified perhaps, but the belief that you can actually change your
abilities is one of the key ingredients in realizing change. At the LSE I
taught econometrics for many years – a statistics-based economics subject
that many students are fearful of. A stylized fact that I am happy to share
with you is that the fear of the subject was very often the factor that stopped
students doing well in it. As an instructor, stripping out that fear was
incredibly helpful for my students – as it ensured that they didn’t avoid
studying simply because they perceived the subject as intimidating. The
best thing I could do for them was to alter their self-belief for the better, so
they stayed on the learning curve.
How did I know that reminding yourself that you can do it in the face of
a hard task would pay dividends? There is extremely compelling evidence
to show that positively changing self-belief improves all sorts of valuable
life outcomes. For example, a 2011 study of more than 15,000 children
illustrated that those encouraged simply to believe that intelligence could be
learned secured far higher scores in a difficult task, compared to a control
group that did not hear these messages.7 Letting people know that they
possess the ability to improve their own intellectual capabilities has also
been shown to improve the grades of students in a number of other
contexts.8 An awareness that you can realize your big-thinking goal helps
you show up for the small steps that ultimately will get you there. There is
also evidence that reaffirmations of this form of personal adequacy are
worthwhile for goal attainment.9
Want to hear something truly encouraging? You can also develop soft
skills at any point in your life,10 meaning you are never too old to improve
your behaviour, self-esteem, grittiness and resilience. Overall, behavioural
science research tells us that simply believing you can improve in a wide
variety of skills gives an immediate boost to performance in those areas.
Want to give yourself the best shot at succeeding on your big-thinking
journey? Why not set aside a moment to reaffirm that you are more than up
to the challenge of becoming ME+. Think about all the small steps that you
have taken so far, as evidence that you are well on your way to your
destination. The key to this working is repetition. Do it every week.
If you find yourself unable to do this for yourself in the beginning, can
you identify a boast buddy? Someone who is in your corner? Someone who
is aware that you are working towards ME+ and can help you move your
own needle of self-belief on those occasions when you need a morale
boost?
 When you do wobble and suffer a blow to your self-belief,
taking some time to remind yourself that the feelings of
insecurity you are experiencing are transitory – rather than
permanent – can help.

What’s the evidence? One brilliant randomized control study emphasized

gains of 0.3 on grade point average for college freshmen who read reports
from a fictitious past pupil stating that feeling out of place was a temporary
phenomenon when they started on their own journey at university – as
compared to students who didn’t hear this message of hope.11 The simple
act of being made aware that it was normal to feel overwhelmed at the
beginning of a medium-term journey helped these students stay on course!
So if you are feeling out of place at networking events, or don’t feel like
you belong on your training course because you cannot keep up, or think
you have nothing worthwhile to say in meetings, remind yourself that these
are transitory feelings.
Keep showing up with this mantra in mind. Keep reminding yourself that
the feeling of not belonging will soon pass. Why? If you stick around
anywhere for long enough, you will eventually belong!

INSIGHT 3: GIVE YOURSELF EXTRA TIME

There were ups and downs in the run-up to my Leaving Cert Examination. I
entered one particular trough around mid-April 1997, when despite the best
of intentions and a number of false starts, I couldn’t quite get it together to
prepare for an English revision class at school …
‘I didn’t think it would take so long, Miss … I didn’t think it would be so
mind-numbingly boring that I would have to restart the first ten pages over
and over and over again.’
That’s me trying to explain to Mrs Fitzgibbon, my English teacher, why I
had no idea how the ending of King Lear qualified as tragedy. What kind of
a question was that anyway? All teenage Grace knew for certain was: 1) the
task of reading King Lear was tragic full stop; and 2) she had grossly
underestimated how long it would take to read it, both in absolute time and
taking into account her extreme levels of procrastination.
When making plans to undertake any activity, there are three parameters
that we make estimates of, either consciously or unconsciously. First, how
long it will take. Second, how much it will cost. Third, the risk involved
with the activity. My King Lear planning had no costs other than boredom,
but I had grossly underestimated how long the reading would take. Worse, I
had underestimated the risk of my own procrastination and ability to avoid
reading this play. But I’m not alone in being a bad planner, both as a child
and now as an adult. Even people who plan professionally get things
spectacularly wrong.
In the last few decades, nothing divides the opportunities of children born
in Ireland more than whether they fell on the good or the bad side of the
‘Celtic Tiger’, a colourful nickname for a period (mid-1990s to late 2000s)
that was notable for its rapid economic growth and better incomes for most.
Over that time, the country initiated – and overran in terms of costs and
time – lots of big projects. One of these was the locally infamous Dublin
Port Tunnel, which in early talks carried a price tag of €100 million. The
tunnel opened in 2006, two years late, and cost €600 million more than was
planned. Even worse than that, innovation had already made the tunnel
obsolete for some drivers by the time it opened. Why? It had been built with
too low a roof to allow the latest lorries to pass through it.
The Irish are not alone in spectacularly bad planning. Down under, in
Australia, the Sydney Opera House underwent a detailed planning phase
which resulted in estimates of a four-year build and $7 million budget. How
did those plans stack up to the eventual reality? Ten years too short and $95
million shy. Meanwhile, in Canada, a planned coliseum with a retractable
roof for the 1976 Summer Olympics came with an estimated cost of $120
million. Guess what? It wasn’t fully finished until 1989, and the roof alone
carried the original price tag. The Channel Tunnel between the UK and
France? Same thing! Late, and with a budget blown to pieces.
Are you starting a new business? This is the type of medium-term plan
that frequently overestimates the probability of success by underestimating
costs and time. Thirty per cent of managers estimate their probability of
failing as zero (which is statistically impossible in a world of economic
uncertainty!), and 80 per cent of them view their odds of succeeding as
being 70 per cent or more.12
What is the underlying cause of all of these planning failures? The
planning fallacy – the recognition of which is owed to work by Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky from 1979.
The planning fallacy is the tendency of people to consistently
underestimate the time that it will take them to do any activity, even if they
have knowledge that similar activities have taken them longer than their
estimates in the past. We are just too bloody optimistic about our
productivity, and this spills over into how easy we think an activity is to
complete. Consequently, the time we allocate to various activities is too low
to allow us to complete them.
When we plan to do something, we assume that things will run smoothly.
We assume that we will experience a best-case scenario, even when this has
not transpired in the past. We assume zero procrastination, fatigue,
distraction or interruption. And this optimism has a knock-on effect on our
time allocation.
Strictly speaking, the planning fallacy refers to our ability to badly
underestimate both the amount of time and money needed to achieve any
goal. However, the evidence is clear that for individual-level decisions,
money estimates can be pretty spot on. Either way, people – over and over
again – underestimate the time it will take to achieve a goal. To put it
bluntly, we completely suck at estimating the time it will take us to get
things done. We struggle with time management. We struggle with sitting
down and getting through the boring stuff, which would leave us free to
stay on track and meet our milestones and deadlines.
I’m pretty sure that the plans you made in Chapter 2 will suffer from the
planning fallacy. I would take that bet as a dead cert. And not allowing for
the planning fallacy means you set yourself up for failure. Imagine sitting
down later this week to complete an activity that you assigned a three-hour
window to. What will it mean if you only get 50 per cent done? Many of us
would be disappointed that we did not perform as expected. Others might
view it as evidence that they are simply not up to the challenge of realizing
ME+ and allow the setback to derail their progress. If you repeatedly fall
victim to the planning fallacy, you’re increasingly likely to feel like it’s all
too much and give up.
So how do you overcome the planning fallacy?
A good starting point is holding a mirror up to yourself and confirming
that you are a victim of this particular cognitive bias. How? Audit all of
your planned projects over the last year. Essentially, you want to come up
with a list of any projects you planned in the last twelve months, regardless
of whether you completed them.
List each of them in the table below, under the heading ‘A plan I made’.
These projects might include things like painting the shed, running a 10K or
helping your sprog catch up on their maths homework, alongside the usual
work goals like getting promoted, securing ten new clients, or finishing a
book in time for the crazy deadline you committed to. The list can also
include more mundane plans like books you planned to read or dental
check-ups and other health screenings.
In the second column, make a note of which life domain each plan is
associated with, using the following categories:

Work (this is your ‘think big’ classification)

Finances
Friends and family
Health
Me-time (i.e. time for self-care)
Personal growth (which may come from sticking to your big-
thinking journey)
Romantic relationships
Self-image
Society (giving back to the world at large, including fundraising and
community work)
Spirituality

For each plan that you have listed, tick one of the final three boxes
depending on whether you ‘crushed it’ (meaning that you achieved the plan
within the expected timeframe), ‘missed it’ (meaning that you did achieve
the plan but it took longer than expected) or ‘never did it’ (meaning the plan
never got done).

A plan I Life Crushed Missed Never did

made domain it it it
 Take some time to reflect on what you’ve written in the table above. If
you ended up with an entire column of ‘crushed it’, you are probably not
being honest with yourself about the things that you planned to do in the
last year. Or maybe you could do more, and stretch yourself further?
Most of us will notice that we tend to crush it in specific life domains,
but in other areas balls get dropped much more regularly. Perhaps there are
life domains missing altogether, and this explains your lack of ‘never did
it’. It is worth considering if you have neglected one area of your life
intentionally, or whether it was because of poor life planning.
Often the people I meet in business who are crushing it in terms of profit
or client generation are dropping the family or health ball without intending
to. This can be detrimental to their own well-being, and it is very different
from intentionally not making plans in a particular life domain.
Everyone has different priorities, of course. I have friends who couldn’t
care less about having a life partner or going on dates, however I would be
lost without my (much) better half. At the same time, I couldn’t care less
about my self-image, and I am very unlikely to devote time to following
fashion trends. These days my self-image is low-maintenance, and I do not
count it as a life domain worth planning for.
When filling in the table above, you may also have found that certain
plans contribute to two or more associated life domains. For example, I get
personal growth from writing this book as well as it contributing to my
work domain. At the same time, I often focus on some life domains more
intensely than others at different points in time. To advance certain work
projects, I like to dive into periods of solitary work. This means I see much
less of friends and family as I hole up and work hard. How do I square this
with my loved ones? Everyone is aware of what I am up to, and we always
have quality time scheduled for the near future. This type of time trade-off
is intentional, and the distinction is important. The ball isn’t dropped, but
it’s not in active play.
Now reflect on your ‘never did it’ plans. Why did you sink those
projects? Did you have something more appealing to pursue? Or was there
a worthwhile reason? Let’s imagine that you enrol in an online course, and
by the fourth lesson you are certain that the content does not interest you.
Perhaps you expected something different, or you’re simply not engaged.
So you ask yourself whether the course is the only pathway to get to where
you need to be within the allocated time. The answer is ‘no’. You then
attend the fifth lesson and are miserable the entire time. Should you take the
time you have already spent on the course into account when weighing up
the costs and benefits of continuing? The answer is ‘no’. If you did, you
would be like someone in a restaurant who insists on finishing a meal even
when their belly is full, just so they can ‘get their money’s worth’. Or
someone who has paid for a movie ticket and insists on staying, despite
being bored to tears and having better things to do with their time. You
would be falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

It is okay to quit if there is an intention to do something much

more worthwhile.

But what if you quit without intention? This happens a lot to people like
me. Like my intention to run a weekly 5K in the beautiful Richmond Park.
The time it takes to complete the training gets nobbled by other plans (or
just my procrastination), and it’s a big tick in my ‘never done it’ column.
Meanwhile, even though you’re reading it now, writing this chapter was a
tick in the ‘missed it’ column – because the planning fallacy was lurking in
the shadows when I set out. I imagined it would take roughly forty hours,
and I could allocate forty hours to a one-week period. But life got in the
way, I got distracted and ran over.
What causes me to run late with my writing deadlines? A myriad of
things! On this occasion, part of the reason is that I spent twenty minutes
zoned out and chewing on my shiny new pencil (no judgement please).
How could I have predicted that would happen? Nobody starts their day
with pencil-chewing scheduled as one of their activities. You don’t usually
plan for distraction.
 Auditing all of your planned projects over the last year should convince
you that we consistently overestimate what we can achieve in our daily
lives – and very often the best-laid plans are discarded for no reason. It
should also illustrate that poor planning crowds out good intentions. By not
leaving enough time for writing this chapter, I missed the endorphin rush of
exercising alongside the deer, butterflies and bunnies in Richmond Park.
Your audit in the table above likely makes it crystal clear that you also
regularly succumb to the planning fallacy, which will negatively affect the
execution of your plans across several life domains. Just knowing about this
bias may help you to drop your planning fallacy habit. However, heightened
saliency may not be enough.
To be more proactive, it is worth scaling up the time you predict your
activities will take by a significant factor – say, by 1.5. So for each hour you
have committed to activities related to ME+, you should now allow an hour
and a half.
Next, commit to refining this scaling factor to reflect the areas you
struggle with most in terms of the planning fallacy. Each week, assess what
proportion of the activities you planned to do was achieved within the
allocated time window. Take care to account for any days you worked later
than planned. As the weeks go by and you repeat this process over and over
again, you will begin to more accurately predict the time it takes to
complete tasks – and also the number you need to personally scale by to
offset your optimism, and beat the planning fallacy. You may even need
different multipliers for different activities, which will allow you to refine
your scheduling further. But a rule of thumb of 1.5 is a great place to start.

INSIGHT 4: RECOMMIT REGULARLY TO YOUR BIG-THINKING

GOAL
‘I can’t imagine myself enjoying any of these, Mum,’ I said, exasperated, as
my finger scrolled through the university catalogue, bypassing law, business
and dentistry. But at the same time, I could imagine I might enjoy all of
them. ‘How am I supposed to know right now what I want to do for the rest
of my life? I haven’t a clue what it would be like to work in any of these
fields. I haven’t any idea what my passion is. Can we flip a coin to decide?’
Only one month away from my final exams, I was finding it hard to
figure out what I wanted to do at university. This would all be okay, but by
not connecting my long study days to a good outcome, I was also making it
harder to show up for my planned study blocks, both physically and
mentally. I was making it harder on myself unwittingly – until, that is, my
finger paused at a BSc in Computer Science, and images of how cool it
would be to create video games, movie graphics and online shopping
experiences appeared vividly in my mind’s eye. Now these were careers
worth getting excited about! These were careers where King Lear could be
a distant memory.
And with that, I declared loudly, ‘I’m going to be a computer scientist!’
Having a clear big-thinking goal in your own mind’s eye will motivate
you to show up week after week for the activities you chose in Chapter 2.
Without this, it will be harder to muster up the motivation to complete the
necessary small steps because you don’t know what you are aiming for.
I should note here that I am still not a computer scientist. While the goal
you set should allow you to move forward, it doesn’t need to be so
inflexible that it defines your ultimate destination forever. The key is to
keep learning and honing skills that will be useful to ME+, and keep
revising your vision of ME+ as new opportunities open up.
The benefits of setting a goal are readily verified by behavioural science
research.13 But what is the mechanism through which goal-setting
operates? Well, in essence, by visualizing ME+ you are bringing your future
self forward. By visualizing your big-thinking goal, you keep in mind the
bigger picture of what you are aiming for. This, in turn, reminds you of the
future benefits your medium-term journey will bring once you reach your
destination. Simply acknowledging these future benefits, and reminding
yourself of your vision for ME+, can help you stay on course.

Set aside some time each month to review and recommit to

your big-thinking goal.

This can be done alongside one of your more regular weekly planning
sessions. Imagine what it will feel like once you have realized ME+. This
serves to actively keep your goal salient in your mind. The more clearly you
tie your small steps in the present to ME+, the more purpose you will find
in doing them.
While having a specific goal makes you far more likely to achieve it, you
also want to avoid being so focused and closed-minded that you miss out on
other appealing opportunities. Do take care to avoid being a victim of
inattentional blindness, a phenomenon explored by Daniel Simons and
Christopher Chabris in a well-known 1999 study. To illustrate the fact that
when we focus on only one thing we block out the rest of the world, the
researchers got a group of adults to observe two teams passing a ball to
each other on a makeshift basketball court. Their task was simple. They
were to count the passes made by the team wearing white shirts, and
actively ignore the passes made by those in black shirts. The participants
took to their task with gusto, diligently counting away. However, their
super-narrow focus meant that they did not see the person dressed as a
gorilla who came on to the playing court beating their chest. Yes, you read
that correctly! They did not see the gorilla! The participants’ intense
concentration meant they missed this fantastic spectacle.
To avoid missing gorilla-shaped opportunities that come your way
because of inattentional blindness, take some time during your monthly
recommitment to your goal to assess new opportunities that are opening up
to you that may pivot your plans or give you new experiences.

INSIGHT 5: MEANING IS A MOTIVATOR

‘I’m going to study computer science.’ Once I had made up my mind, I was
pretty defiant about what I would be studying at university. My family,
friends and even strangers whose ears I would bend were surprised, and
couldn’t quite see the logic in this decision-making. At that time, I knew
little about how there would be only five women for every ninety-five men
studying my chosen degree. I knew less still about the exact jobs that a
computer science degree might open up. To be honest, I didn’t even know
that Java wasn’t a foreign language when I sent off the application forms
that would seal the fate of my next four years.
But I finally had a goal. And despite my lack of knowledge of the ins and
outs of studying computer science, my goal did have overall meaning. I was
aware of how technology was shaping the world, through creating products
that were useful in society. I wanted to be involved in building technologies
that would make the world a better place. Technologies that would allow
people to live their best lives. Technologies that would give easy access
education.
In Chapter 2, you chose activities to engage in as small steps towards
realizing your big-thinking goal. Because taking these small steps will
allow you to become ME+, you have already identified their meaning. This
innately gives the small steps purpose.
But does your goal serve a higher purpose? Are you pursuing a big-
thinking goal that aligns with your own core values? What will the work
you plan to do bring to the world in terms of added value?
Identifying this added value connects the dots as to the overall meaning
of what you are trying to achieve, and this can keep you motivated when
your energy wanes. You can start to view the small steps, and the time they
take, as a production process – and the result of this production process is a
meaningful end product. It is worth reminding yourself of this when you get
disillusioned.
Why does identifying the meaning of your goal tend to keep you on
track? There is ample evidence that when a goal is identified as meaningful,
individuals put much more effort into fulfilling it,14 and viewing your ME+
– your big-thinking goal – as meaningful will dramatically increase the
likelihood that you fulfil your plan.15 It can be a morale boost that keeps
you showing up. Another nice side effect is that finding meaning in one’s
daily activities (your small steps) has been linked to increased happiness
and higher levels of motivation,16 as well as lower levels of stress and
cynicism.
So how can you identify the meaning behind your big-thinking goal?
Start by drawing attention to things about the work you want ME+ to do.17
Ask yourself whether you think your future career will:
Cause you to feel happy, fulfilled and/or proud.
Create positive ripple effects that go beyond the immediate benefits
generated by you – such as benefits to the community or even
humanity.
The first of these categories is about the meaning that the work of ME+
brings to you personally. What makes us happy, fulfilled or proud might
include growth opportunities, respect, connection to others, altruism,
prosperity, the ability to create, and status. In contrast, the second category
is about the external meaning of your work. For example, ME+ may
empower, empathize, bring safety to, make life better for, create jobs for,
care for or teach others.
Take a moment to identify the meaning behind the work you have chosen
for ME+ in terms of these two categories. Armed with this information,
think of a skill that you have now, or a skill you are cultivating for ME+,
that would allow you to do this meaningful work well. This exercise allows
you to tap into authenticity and self-efficacy as mechanisms to increase the
meaning of the work you intend ME+ to do. You gain authenticity by
realizing that the skills you possess, or those you are working towards,
allow you to carry out this meaningful work, which benefits you and/or
others directly. Self-efficacy improves by increasing your self-awareness of
what it means to have these skills.
I recommend that you repeat this exercise regularly, perhaps at a set time
each day, so the meaning of what you are trying to achieve stays salient
throughout your medium-term journey.

Linking yourself – and your unique skill set – to the meaning

of your work enhances your intrinsic motivation to stick to your
planned small steps.

Committing to doing this simple mental exercise can even harness

motivation for jobs that are not particularly pleasant to do on a day-to-day
basis.
 I provided evidence that finding meaning in one’s work can
improve productivity, even for the most boring tasks, in a 2019
field experiment conducted with Alberto Salamone at a
manufacturing firm in the US. The workers we studied were
employed in jobs that involved very repetitive tasks. These
jobs, to most people (including the workers themselves),
would be described as ‘boring’.
We put posters on their production floor on a random day,
which made salient to these workers the meaning and
importance of the job they were doing. There were three parts
to each poster. The first was designed to recognize the
workers’ own skill sets. The second was designed to
emphasize the wider purpose of the product they were
making – in this instance, we were reminding the workers that
they manufactured the lights that keep people safe when they
cross train tracks or drive on the road. The third component
personalized the benefits of the product they made. We
showed them the faces of the people they were helping to
keep safe.
Overall, our study showed that making the meaning of work
salient through this three-step process hugely increased the
intrinsic motivation of these workers, causing them to work
longer hours and miss fewer days. At times of low motivation,
it is worth visualizing the people who will gain from your future
work – whether that is children you will teach, consumers who
will be better off with the service you provide, colleagues who
will gain from your fantastic leadership, or your family who will
gain from you having a better work–life balance. If you want to
go all out, you could even design a poster and put it in a
prominent place!

INSIGHT 6: WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE

At the end of every study day in April 1997, I unpinned my timetable from
the wall and crossed off my achievements so it represented what I had
actually done on that particular day. With fewer than five weeks to go until
my first exam, I noticed that my planning had markedly improved. Back
then I didn’t know anything about the planning fallacy – least of all its
name – but this simple self-assessment made the symptoms of this cognitive
trap so clear that I found myself automatically giving myself extra time for
certain subjects in order to get through the allocated material.
ME+ is a construct of thinking big. The activities you have chosen need
to become routine processes that you engage in regularly, otherwise you
will not fulfil your ambitions. To give yourself the best shot at regularly
engaging in these small steps, planning them ahead of time is crucial. More
than that, engaging in a post-mortem that maps what you actually did
against what you planned to do will help you plan better for the future. It
also ensures you hold yourself to account.
So how can you incorporate a post-mortem into your planning? You will
already be writing commitments to carry out activities at the start of each
week. This makes clear your intentions. You could also add to this list what
you hope to achieve in each session. For example, if you are writing a
proposal that you expect to be 10,000 words long, you may set intentions
for Monday to write 2,000 words over a three-hour period between 8 p.m.
and 11 p.m. When you have finished your writing period, a post-mortem
would then note how many hours you actually wrote for, alongside the
word count you delivered.
Notice I counted words as an output along with time taken. Why? Word
count better represents visible progress towards a big-thinking goal. It also
ensures that the real progress that is being made is clear because seeing
progress improves performance.18 If you’ve written 5,000 words of a
10,000-word paper, you know you’re halfway.
Monitoring in this way works well for all kinds of things. For instance:
Securing new clients for your food delivery business? Count the
number of emails and telephone calls you make and follow up on.
Compare this to the number that you intended to do.
Doing small-business-related administration tasks such as tax returns,
filing expenses and payroll? When setting intentions, make a list of all
of these tasks and commit to doing a specific number per session,
marking them off as you go.
You get the idea …
Overall, by embracing a philosophy that what gets measured gets done,
your progress will not slide too far without you knowing.
 And for those of us who also need carrots to show up for ourselves, you
can easily embed incentives into a post-mortem. How? Reward yourself on
the occasions that your output exceeds your plans by a significant margin.
For example, if in a week of writing you find yourself 2,000 words in
credit, you can give yourself the evening off to indulge in whatever gives
you instant gratification, relaxed in knowing that you are right on track.

INSIGHT 7: LUCK VERSUS EFFORT

The main event had arrived and one exam went spectacularly badly: an
English paper.
‘It’s not my fault, Mum. How was I to know that so much of the exam
would be on King Lear? It was just bad luck,’ I exclaimed.
Of course, it wasn’t bad luck. Everyone knew it was definitely coming
up. I was simply ill-prepared. To add insult to injury, the question on the
exam had asked whether the ending of King Lear could be seen as tragic …
Over the course of your medium-term journey, there will be some major
milestones to overcome, like interviews, public speaking events, pitching
opportunities to investors, and assessments of the work you put out into the
world. Some of these occasions will go well. Other occasions will not go so
well. Disentangling whether the outcome – be it good or bad – is owed
largely to luck or effort allows you to continuously improve and learn from
the milestones you have passed.
In the last section, I suggested you commit to a post-mortem of your
regular daily commitments – being honest about whether you had showed
up for yourself. Now I am suggesting you carry out a post-mortem for
major milestones, with a realistic assessment of whether your efforts are the
true cause of you getting ahead (or falling over).
Committing to engaging in post-mortems to answer why you ended up
failing a particular milestone – or why you didn’t put yourself forward for
an opportunity – can provide a clear perspective as long as you
simultaneously commit to being brutally honest with yourself. Back at
school I was failing on the honesty component. I knew the importance of
King Lear in my exam, and the preparation question given to me at school
bore an unquestionably canny resemblance to what had actually come up in
the real thing. If I had done an honest post-mortem, I would have concluded
that my performance was hampered by a lack of effort, rather than bad luck.
This would have allowed me to prepare better for my next time at the test-
taking rodeo.

Remember that any outcome in our lives is a product of both

effort and luck.

In variable ratios, luck and effort determine your marital status, the
number of children you have, the amount of money you earn, and the work
you do for a living right now. Luck is random and very much outside your
own control. It is being in the right place at the right time. I do like to
distinguish fair luck (for example, winning the lottery) from luck that is
determined by privilege (being born into a wealthy family). However, for
the case of a post-mortem, you can combine luck and privilege because, just
like luck, you did not choose your privilege.
You should undertake a major-milestone post-mortem when you have
had a big win, experienced a failure or an unexpected opportunity has
arisen. This type of major post-mortem should be approached with the
knowledge that it is possible you have experienced a good outcome simply
because luck dominated, and equally you may have experienced failure
because bad luck dominated. View this major post-mortem as a time to
reflect on the decisions and efforts that you made, and how they got you to
where you are on that day. View it as a time to learn, rather than a time to
lament or be too self-congratulatory.
The template below can be used for your milestone post-mortem:

Major Milestone:

Outcome:

What decision was What went What went

made? right? wrong?

1.

2.

3.
 4.

5.

Think about the last major milestone that impacted you. This could be
anything from taking an examination at school or university, to unveiling a
product that you have been working on, to attending an interview. It can
even be something outside the world of work if you prefer.
Make a note of the milestone that you are thinking about, along with its
final outcome, at the top of the table. Before your day of reckoning came,
there would have been a series of decisions you made which partially
determined how successful you were in terms of that milestone. List them
in the spaces above. Notice that I have left space for five decisions. This is
to encourage you to reflect on all the decisions that got you to that point.
People often try to distil the success or failure of major milestones down to
one or two key decisions, but this rarely reflects reality. Try to stretch
yourself and identify at least five decisions. Now take the opportunity to
write out what went right and what went wrong for each decision.
Why is this useful?

It is important that you judge your progress by the quality of

your decision-making, as opposed to the quality of your
outcomes.

After all, outcomes conflate luck with effort. You will no doubt notice in
your ‘What went right?’ and ‘What went wrong?’ columns that you
encountered luck. Perhaps you made a decision to study only a subset of
questions, and they came up in your examination. Was this an informed
decision guided by the teacher or did you take a risk in order to reduce the
effort you would have to make? Or maybe you only tested your product on
a millennial audience prior to unveiling. Was this strategic? Or did you
exclude a large proportion of your customer base?
A major post-mortem also allows you to ask yourself if the outcome
encountered in the milestone – good or bad – came about because of
intentional actions. If the reason you’re flying high right now is because of
a lucky break, you can’t guarantee that you’re going to keep getting lucky
breaks. By all means ride the wave, but don’t expect it to have any bearing
on future outcomes. For example, if you put yourself forward for a
freelance project and get the gig, it is worth assessing the level of effort that
you put into the bid, and where possible find out what your new client liked
about your pitch. This might teach you more about how much preparation
time you need to give yourself to ensure the best chance of success. It also
allows you to identify which attributes of your product or services are doing
the heavy lifting in securing new clients, and which are not being noticed. It
is possible that, during this process, you recognize that your pitch was
lacking in some ways, even though it succeeded. Perhaps you notice that
you were affected by the planning fallacy when writing it, and had some
sleepless nights trying to get it finished on time. Perhaps you recognize that
your bid had blind spots. Maybe you excluded some people from the
service you were offering without meaning to. Or maybe you realize that
this kind of pitch is going to take an extraordinary amount of time, and
while it provides a pay cheque right now, it doesn’t serve your longer-term
purposes very well.
On occasions when you didn’t get the gig, the major post-mortem keeps
the same format. You reflect on whether or not you truly gave the pitch your
best shot in terms of preparation time, and where possible find out from the
client that turned you down about why your pitch wasn’t successful. Even if
you cannot access such feedback, you can actively ask yourself whether the
bid represents your best work by rereading it. Or maybe there was some
other aspect of the bid that clearly negatively affected the outcome – were
you asking for too much money, perhaps?
It can happen that when you reread your pitch, you still view it as
excellent. On this occasion, maybe you just got unlucky. It’s important
when you don’t succeed to not always blame the world for being unfair,
particularly if you encounter the same problem again and again. Rather than
blaming others for your failures, try to salvage the positives from the
experience. Glean as much information as you can from any failed process.
Proactively make a list, using the template above, of all the things that you
did to make it go well, and also where you let your efforts slip. This is a
process that will stop you judging yourself only by successful outcomes –
which are, in part, driven by luck. Learning provides a silver lining in the
face of failure, helping you persevere.
There will be many situations in your journey when you intentionally put
yourself forward for something that requires time and effort up front. It
could be anything – job interviews, public speaking, article-writing, pitches
to potential investors, an oral examination in a foreign language, leading a
meeting, or even elections for office. A major milestone post-mortem using
the template above is always beneficial.
You can help the post-mortem process along by defining what a good
outcome looks like to you before you even put your hat in the ring. This is
pretty clear when you are bidding for a freelance gig, but what about when
you are public speaking or leading a meeting? How will you define
success? Having a clear idea of what a good outcome is will help you when
it comes to doing your post-mortem after the event. You will know for sure
what ‘good’ looks like.

INSIGHT 8: MIND YOUR EMOTIONS

‘Maybe I should dump the idea of going to university altogether. I’ve had
enough. I hate maths,’ I complained during my maths revision. It happened
that my mum was folding the laundry in the next room. Aware of the crash
and burn in English Paper 1, and not wanting this failure to cause an
emotional reaction that would affect my long-term future unnecessarily,
Mum was quick to offer me a break from berating myself.
‘Why don’t you take the rest of the evening off, Grace? You’ve been
working really hard. You should have a well-deserved break and watch a
movie.’
Throughout your journey, you will make a few big decisions and many
small decisions. The small decisions you will make are things like deciding
to show up for your activities on a daily basis. The big decisions are things
like deciding what those activities actually are, and the big-thinking goal to
aim for. Together, these big and small decisions will determine whether you
succeed.
As a teenager, the negative experience I was having during my study
periods for my Leaving Certificate exam (my activity) was threatening to
have a knock-on negative effect on a bigger, high-stakes goal (going to
university – after all, a computer science degree needed a good grade in
maths!). Aware of the role of emotions in poor decision-making, my mum
leapt in to separate the big decision of not going to university from the
emotional reaction related to expecting to do badly on Maths Paper 1. Mum
also avoided drawing attention to the fact that the frustration I was feeling
was transitory. It would probably pass by tomorrow.
 Whatever the size of the decision you are making, it is worth
remembering that emotions play a large role in determining
what you do.

This is particularly relevant when you are about to either quit or start
something that will have a big impact on your big-thinking goal. It is also
useful when there is a trend of you not showing up for your regular
activities. You should consciously probe the emotion behind your decision.
Are you not showing up because you fear failure? Or is it that the learning
curve is so steep you are trying to avoid feeling frustrated?
Your big-thinking plan is ambitious, and on some occasions you’re going
to feel out of your depth. This is natural. If it were easy, everyone would be
achieving the goals they set for themselves. Accepting that whatever you
are feeling – a fear of failure, a frustration at your lack of progress – is
transitory can help you persevere.
In 2007, Paul Slovic and colleagues showed that emotional reactions feed
into our performance and the decisions that we make. There are two
categories of emotions that can disrupt us. First are those emotions that are
integral to the task at hand. For example, the fear you legitimately feel
before an interview, an important pitch or a public speaking event can cause
an emotional reaction that impacts your performance. Second are so-called
incidental emotions, caused by the other things that are going on in your life
– like dealing with toxic co-workers, caring for an ill relative, or worries
about personal debt – that also impact your performance.19 Both types of
emotional response are more readily handled by individuals with higher
levels of emotional intelligence, a skill that is learnable and worth
developing. (We will talk more about building resilience and handling
emotional reactions in Chapter 7.)
The bottom line for now? Beware of your emotions when making
decisions, and do not make big decisions in haste.
In behavioural science, when emotions impact on actions it is called the
affect heuristic. This interplay between heart and mind means that, when
assessing options for ME+, you may have a tendency to view some through
rose-coloured glasses simply because you have positive feelings towards
them, and conversely you may overlook options for which you have
negative feelings. When any opportunity arises, question the direction of
your response, and probe if it is being driven by emotion. Maybe it is your
gut reaction to turn down opportunities when asked by people you do not
yet know or have built a rapport with. Or perhaps you are spending your
precious time doing tasks that do not stretch you with people whose
company you enjoy.
You may also make errors in judgement because of your emotions when
you are deciding how to allocate time among the small steps for your big-
thinking journey. All the steps are necessary, but engaging in them gives
you different levels of pleasure. If two skills are necessary for ME+, you
may find yourself overinvesting in small steps that hone the skill you find
the easiest. Behind this decision is likely an emotional reaction. No one
feels good about themselves when they are engaging in an activity they do
not find easy or enjoyable.
What can you do about this? Remind yourself that the emotions you have
towards that particular activity are transitory, and will pass as soon as you
have reached a certain level of mastery. Make the promise to turn up ten
times and engage in the activity you find difficult. After you have done this,
reassess to see if the unpleasant emotions have disappeared with the time.

When making any key life decision, it should be done with a

cool head.

In practice, this means asking for time to let thoughts settle when you are
put on the spot by other people. For some, this time can be used to make a
list of the costs, benefits and risks associated with the various pathways that
are available to you. This process can allow you to more closely mimic
rational decision-making, in which you account as much as possible for the
upside, downside and risk of each option. For others, the simple fact of
having some time is enough to prevent knee-jerk reactions and allow you to
feel certain about your choice. Although it is possibly not the most romantic
tactic if someone proposes marriage, this approach should help you feel
more satisfied with your decision-making come post-mortem time in your
big-thinking journey!
 TOP TIP: JOURNALING CAN HELP WITH DECISION-
MAKING
Being more mindful of the role emotions play in determining
whether you show up for your activities – and how you react
to big opportunities over the course of your journey – can be
helped by journaling frequently. Keep in mind that you should
never make a decision that will impact ME+ when you are
angry, aroused, hungry, upset, disgusted, fearful, exhilarated,
or feeling any other intense emotion. By all means discuss
options with others in an emotional state, but put some time
between that moment and when the decision needs to be
made.
This is also a good rule of thumb for when someone
irritates you – don’t immediately react in person, via email or
on the phone. Give yourself some time to put emotional
reactions behind you, and respond when you are more
measured and calm. In the meantime, don’t let anyone poke
the bear!

INSIGHT 9: IT’S NOT ALL OR NOTHING

Back in Ireland in 1997, the Leaving Certificate exams took place over
about a one-month period in June. In the beginning, exam days come thick
and fast, but towards the end the gaps between them are as much as a week
apart. I had a gap of eight days, with the primary goal being swotting up on
my final subject. However, I soon found myself growing frustrated,
suffering from concentration lapses and unrelenting procrastination. My
nails and pencils were thoroughly chewed as I stared despondently at my
lack of progress on the third of those eight days.
‘Everything doesn’t always have to be all or nothing, Grace. Maybe some
days you should be happy when you show up and make progress, even if
it’s half of what you had planned,’ Mum counselled, in response to my
expressed frustration that I had only made it halfway through my planned
chemistry revision session.
Some of you will fail to launch. You will set intentions for small-step
activities and not manage to complete them in their entirety, despite trying
week after week. There are two main reasons why this happens …
 First, you may be overcommitting yourself and falling victim to the
planning fallacy: you think you can do too much within an allocated time
window. You might want to check your scaling factor.
Second, you may not yet have the mojo needed to create a rhythm and
execute the activities (notice that I said yet!) when the allotted time arrives.
You daydream, make tea and WhatsApp your friends. At networking events
you stand and chat with the person you have known for years. Anything but
do the one thing that you intended to do.
So how can you change this?
Why not check if the compromise effect can work for you?20 When
planning activities, the typical approach is to commit to doing one specific
thing fully, and then crossing it off once completed. However, rather than
framing it as all or nothing, how about setting different workloads that are
low, medium and high? You can then allow yourself to choose which to
complete depending on how you feel on the day. If the compromise effect
works on you, you will find yourself hitting the medium workload much
more often than not.

TOP TIP: INTEGRATING THE COMPROMISE EFFECT

INTO YOUR DAILY ROUTINE
What does the compromise effect look like for a daily activity
in practice? Let’s imagine once again that you are trying to
write that pesky 10,000-word proposal. You might set
intentions for workloads on Monday as follows:

1 HIGH – write 2,000 words over a three-hour period between

8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
2 MEDIUM – write 1,000 words over a two-hour period
between 8.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m.
3 LOW – write 500 words over a one-hour period between
9.30 p.m. and 10.30 p.m.

If you are exhausted on Monday, you may choose the low or

medium option. But once you get going, perhaps you hit flow
and manage the high workload after all.
INSIGHT 10: ADD A STICK TO YOUR WEEKLY PLANNING
‘I’m so glad that I came through this time, Mum. I would have been gutted
if I’d had to hand over my Féile tickets to Gillian. The threat of losing out
on that has been enough to keep me on track and smash all of my study
goals. Thank God the bet is over and I can stop worrying about losing those
tickets.’
Teenage Grace kicked off her shoes and settled in smugly to watch her
favourite sitcom. Since the tickets to that year’s most awesome concert
were safely in my hands, and the Leaving Cert was over, my younger self
felt relaxed and was waiting for her grades to be announced …
Every week you may set intentions for activities for the week ahead.
However, I would hazard a guess that there won’t be any huge
consequences if you don’t get the job done, aside from a bit of self-berating.
If you are good at post-rationalization (telling yourself a convincing story as
to why it is okay not to show up for yourself daily), self-berating won’t get
you back on the horse. It will also make you feel bad, and encourage a
narrative that you have failed. If you know what I am talking about here, it
might be time you add a stick into your weekly planning as a commitment
device.

Incorporating a stick into your weekly planning means that if

you don’t meet your intended targets, you have to give up
something of tangible worth.

Incorporating ‘punishments’ that involve the loss of hard-earned cash –

or giving up something you were looking forward to – is a great way to
make sure you follow through on your planned activities. It brings the costs
associated with not completing an activity into the present day. You lose
cash now versus only losing out on a goal that won’t be realized for five
more years anyway.
The pain involved in the commitment device is immediate. It puts ‘skin
in the game’. There is a lot of hard evidence that suggests that commitment
devices modify hard-to-change behaviours.21 Just anticipating the loss
keeps the goal fresh in your mind.
TOP TIP: PUTTING A COMMITMENT DEVICE INTO
PRACTICE
How: Commit to handing over cold hard cash or something
else of value in the event that you do not complete an activity.

Who: Make the commitment to yourself, a friend, a family

member, co-worker or online.

What happens if you fail: You lose the cash or item of value
you have committed. In practice, it can go to a charity, or you
can even pledge to give to a cause that you really disagree
with. For example, those who are anti-guns could promise to
give money to the National Rifle Association, and those who
are anti-hunting could pledge to donate to a hunting club. This
may be more effective than promises of charitable giving.
Why? Because to give money to a cause that you hate would
mean you are acting in a way that is out of line with how you
see yourself. Your ego helps ensure that you avoid doing this
because if you did there would be an unpalatable
psychological cost.

Online resource: If you are interested in commitment

devices, it is worth checking out stickK.com, which allows you
to create a commitment contract online to ensure you follow
through with your intentions. At the time of writing, almost
500,000 commitments have been created on the site, and
almost 50 million dollars have been pledged. You can
customize the goal you want to work towards (whether it’s
finding a new career or running a marathon) and then decide
on how much money you will lose if you don’t follow through
on your plans. If you do need a stick to be automatically
administered when you miss your commitments, then
stickK.com may work for you.

REACHING YOUR GOAL

Rebalancing costs and benefits so that they occur now rather than in the
future is the key to ensuring you carry out your planned activities and
realize your big-thinking goal. Always remember that time-sinkers drag you
down. They may be fun in the moment, but they will cost you dearly by
stealing time that could be invested in realizing ME+.
In this chapter, we’ve explored and identified where you will find the
time to invest in activities that move you towards ME+. Reflect on the ten
behavioural science insights, and think about which one you’d like to work
on first. These insights can help you stay the course, and should be referred
to at times when you are struggling to keep motivated.
Let’s recap …
INSIGHT 1: REBALANCING IMMEDIATE COSTS AND
BENEFITS
The time you will devote to your small steps has a cost now,
and the benefits are far in the future. Setting yourself carrots
and sticks for achieving tasks can help you see these long-
term costs and benefits in the present.

INSIGHT 2: CULTIVATE SELF-BELIEF

Take time to cultivate self-belief, safe in the knowledge that it
is malleable. When starting difficult tasks, remind yourself that
the uncertainty you may feel about your abilities is transitory,
and will disappear if you keep taking small steps towards your
big-thinking goal.

INSIGHT 3: GIVE YOURSELF EXTRA TIME

Scale up the timings you have suggested for individual tasks
by 1.5, to allow yourself more time than you think you need.

INSIGHT 4: RECOMMIT REGULARLY TO YOUR BIG-

THINKING GOAL
Set aside time regularly to bring your big-thinking goal into
clear focus. Making salient the benefits of the time you are
devoting to your new journey will mean it is more likely that
you keep showing up.

INSIGHT 5: MEANING IS A MOTIVATOR

Identify the meaning of the work ME+ will do, and bring it to
mind regularly to help you stay motivated.

INSIGHT 6: WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE

Do regular post-mortems of the activities you have committed
to, as this will help you assess and identify the obstacles that
are holding you back.

INSIGHT 7: LUCK VERSUS EFFORT

When reflecting on how tasks have gone and whether you
succeeded or failed, consider whether the outcome was
 shaped more by luck or effort. This allows you to see more
clearly the occasions when your decision-making caused the
outcome, versus factors outside your control.

INSIGHT 8: MIND YOUR EMOTIONS

When making decisions that will significantly affect your big-
thinking journey, always do so with a cool head. This will give
you the best opportunity of accurately assessing the long-
term costs, benefits and risks, rather than acting on fleeting
emotions.

INSIGHT 9: IT’S NOT ALL OR NOTHING

Consider creating high, medium and low workload aims for
the activities you plan to do, so that when it comes to doing
the task, you can complete the version that best matches your
energy that day. Small progress is better than no progress.

INSIGHT 10: ADD A STICK TO YOUR WEEKLY PLANNING

If smaller carrots and sticks do not work to keep you on track,
consider commitment devices, with a harder punishment like
the loss of hard-earned cash or something else that is
valuable.

To help you on your journey experimenting with these ten behavioural

science insights, begin by choosing one that sounds easy and appealing. Pay
attention to the benefits that this insight brings in terms of accomplishing
your planned activities on time. If you see no benefit after one week, stop
doing it and choose another insight. If it does work, keep doing it, and add a
second insight to your regime. These insights are not mutually exclusive,
and by taking a trial-and-error approach, you can build up an arsenal of
tools to help you work better and keep you on the path to success.
I know for sure that if you commit to this strategy, you’ll be far more
likely to take regular small steps and realize your big-thinking goal. Not
only are there oodles of behavioural science research papers that convince
me that’s the case, but I also have my own lived and learned experience.
As a teenager, my mum was there to motivate me, and she unknowingly
drew on many lessons of behavioural science to help me stay on the path to
university. Mum made accomplishing great things so much easier, despite
my tendency to favour happiness today over contentment tomorrow.
My preference for choosing fun today over a big-thinking goal of
tomorrow is still a knee-jerk reaction. How do I address this limitation in
my psychology? In the same ways I have pointed you towards in this
chapter. I took the general learnings from the behavioural sciences literature
and applied them to myself, one by one. After a week, I assessed if the
change I had made had made a positive difference in my behaviour. If it did,
I continued with it. If not, I tried something else. Simple!
I am here – as a living and breathing experiment – to tell you that it’s
worked for me. And if it worked for me, it can work for you too!

Happy intervening!
Before we move on, make sure that you:
Do a time audit and identify time-sinkers that you can free
yourself from.
Select one behavioural science insight that you will incorporate
into your daily life from tomorrow.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER

1 Carrots and sticks: Rewards and punishments that are

used to induce behavioural change.

2 Planning fallacy: The tendency for people to

underestimate the time that it will take them to do any
activity, even if they know that similar activities have taken
them longer than their estimates in the past.

3 Affect heuristic: A mental shortcut that causes people to

take actions or make decisions quickly while influenced by
their current emotions.

4 Compromise effect: The tendency to avoid extreme

choices when making decisions.

5 Commitment device: A pledge that an individual makes

now which alters the costs and benefits of choices made in
the future.
 CHAP T E R 4

Inside

It was September 1997, and I had managed to get into university to study
computer science. There was a lot of fuss made in my family, particularly
by my mum. She oscillated between mega proud and mega sad, celebrating
and lamenting the loss of her youngest child in equal measure.
Because I had attended a school where few girls went to university,
nobody had bothered to tell me that girls normally don’t pursue science,
technology or engineering at university. This was a stereotype that I was
never presented with, and so I never internalized it. In fact, I had never
really thought about what a computer scientist should look like, and I hadn’t
noticed that all of my role models over in Silicon Valley were male. It
should, then, have been quite the surprise to attend my first Java coding
lecture on a wet Monday morning at 9 a.m. only to find that, of the 150+
students on my course, fewer than ten were female. I say should have been,
but again I didn’t really notice.
My lack of awareness of the stereotypes was to my benefit. These kinds
of social stereotypes usually form expectations about what sort of life we
should lead. But social stereotypes have next to nothing to do with our
skills, abilities or hard preferences. Or, to put it another way, girls are told
so often that they don’t like computer science and they are no good at it,
that eventually they start to believe it – even though there is no evidence to
suggest that girls are any less suited to computer science than boys are.
Sigh.
We have explored how the human need for immediate gratification can
stop you fulfilling your big-thinking goal. Now we will look at how a
number of cognitive biases have the potential to make you veer off course,
too.
 Cognitive biases are errors in our thinking that occur because
of our brains’ attempts to simplify the world and make
decisions quickly.

Some of these biases are caused by remembering past events

inaccurately, and others are down to the limits of our attention, meaning we
pay attention to only a selection of what is happening in the world around
us.
Cognitive biases can affect your ME+ journey by holding you back and
preventing you from taking the small steps needed for progress. Whether
we like to admit it or not, we all have biases: how we view the world has
been shaped by our experiences up to this point. When I was growing up,
many girls avoided science, technology and engineering because of
stereotype bias. Cognitive biases will have shaped key aspects of the big-
thinking planning you conducted in Chapter 2. These biases are worth
discussing. Remember, your cognitive biases are yours. They are different
from biases that are held by other people which can hinder your progress.
We’ll get to those in the next chapter, but for now we’re going to focus on
your biases.
If you are rolling your eyes at the idea that cognitive biases are holding
you back and you’re thinking, ‘I don’t have any biases, I see the world for
what it is,’ I am afraid you’re wrong. And that eye-rolling is probably
caused by the bias blind spot!1
The bias blind spot is our tendency to see ourselves as less affected by
biases in comparison with other people. For those afflicted, cognitive biases
are other people’s problem, and they themselves are above them. What’s
more, if this book has whetted your appetite for all things behavioural
science, you may be more likely to fall victim to this particular blind spot.
As you learn more about the litany of biases that affect people’s daily
decision-making, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that they don’t
apply to you. Try not to fall into this trap!
But if it’s easy to spot biases, why is it so hard to stop them from slowing
down your progress? Many of these biases are engaged by System 1, your
fast brain, at an unconscious level. So while it’s easy to understand that we
all have biases, it’s not easy to stop ourselves from having them.
The good news is that while it is difficult to rewire our brains to avoid
bias, it is not impossible. Extra effort to spot these biases popping up should
be made when we are making big decisions or approaching major
milestones. Behavioural science has taught me that I can overcome
cognitive biases at key moments by acknowledging their existence, slowing
right down and making a conscious effort to avoid them. In this chapter,
along with drawing attention to the areas of your big-thinking plan that may
be most affected by cognitive biases, I will provide behavioural science
insights on how they can be mitigated. You can choose to embrace all of the
insights, or select a few that you view as the most relevant for your own
journey. All I ask is that, once you have selected the insights you would like
to action, you pay attention to whether they have benefits for your big-
thinking journey.

INSIGHT 1: BIASES IN YOUR NETWORKS AND INFLUENCERS

Back in 1998, as a dedicated student of computer science, I took to
assignments in my Java programming course with gusto. Each one would
begin with a project idea, given to us by a professor, that we would have to
turn into a real-life object. I built simple games, designed automatic
lighting, and more. To learn what we needed to know we had regular two-
hour coding labs. I often devoted many hours to ensuring I had got my
projects right. It was on one of those occasions, about midway through my
first term, that I collared my professor at the end of class for extra help –
something wasn’t working but I had no idea what was going wrong. We had
been together for more than an hour, with him still not having helped me
find a resolution, when, in an attempt to break the silence, I asked a
seemingly innocent question.
‘Do you think there is an issue with there being so few women in
computer science, as this is the field that determines the types of
technologies that will be created in the future …?’ I trailed off as I saw my
professor grimace. At that precise moment, the computer spat out another
error.
In Chapter 2, I offered suggestions for how to get out into the world and
get to know some new people that can guide you and give you access to
new opportunities. You came up with the names of three people that you
would meet over the next three months (see p. 54).
Take a look back at that list now. Write next to each name the following
information about each person: gender, age, race, country of birth and
where they were educated. If you do not know, give it your best guess. Do
they all share a lot of similar characteristics? If so, you may have been
bitten by stereotype bias. You may have a certain (false) belief about who
can help you move ahead in your journey, and it is causing you to seek out
interactions that align with this stereotype of what a ‘good’ person looks
like. Some common stereotypes link entrepreneurship to masculine traits,
technological savviness to youth, and occupations involving care to women.
The people on your list may also have an awful lot of similarities to you.
Write down any observable characteristics about you that you view as major
parts of your identity, and compare them to those of the people on your list.
I did this thought experiment with Erica, a friend of mine. Erica is an
ambitious thirty-something climbing the management ranks in retail. Her
list ended up being a cast of females around her own age in retail, who were
all flat-lining in middle management. While education and race varied a bit,
each woman had children. Actually, each woman had exactly two children.
And guess what? Erica also has two children.
Behind Erica’s choices was the need to have her sentiments confirmed
that being a working mother is hard – too hard, in fact, to pursue her ME+
with gusto. And yes, to some extent, Erica is right. It is hard to juggle work
and children, and it’s even harder as a woman. However, pursuing this
strategy would not have allowed Erica to expand her network as she had
intended it to. Rather, it would have given her a healthy dose of
confirmation bias and ended up as a time-sinker. I am not saying that each
of these women would not have had something valuable to say to Erica. But
there would have been considerable overlap in what they had to tell her.
Swapping in some more diverse choices would therefore be worthwhile.
Say hello to similarity bias. This is our tendency to surround ourselves
with people just like ourselves. We like our own company very much, and
want to replicate it over and over again. These folk tend to have similar
viewpoints to us, making it much easier for us to confirm our ideas as
brilliant – in other words, to be affected by confirmation bias. While a
group of similar people may challenge you, they will all challenge you in
roughly the same way. This may work out well if your group has power and
can hire you for the activities you want to be doing. However, assuming the
journey you want to take is about personal growth, I encourage you to think
again about who you spend your time with or seek advice from.
 One of the easiest ways to grow quickly is to get feedback
from people with diverse backgrounds and life experiences.

Why? Different types of thinkers give you different types of advice. If

you are setting up a business, do you want only one type of customer? If
you are designing a product, have you thought about how women’s needs
are different from men’s? If you are writing an article, do you want it to be
read only by people in their twenties – or older people, too? If you are
advancing in your firm, do you want to be supported by only one type of
colleague? Whatever you are doing, your mind should be as open as
possible to all opportunities.
There is an intuitive reason why diverse teams are better problem-
solvers, better at predicting the future, and more innovative.2 Their
members have lived different lives, pursued different skill sets, and each of
them has a different stock of knowledge. They do not all think the same
way. They do not all repeat the same ideas. As a result, they can get to the
front much quicker than teams with only one type of background, skill set
or knowledge base. Combat similarity and confirmation biases by
reassessing the people that you have chosen as your potential influencers. If
need be, make some changes so that the viewpoints you hear are different
from your own – and from each other – giving you a higher probability of
success.
The best managers I have observed are always willing to hire people that
are better than themselves. There are two reasons why this is a great idea.
First, the average productivity of the team is mechanically raised. Second,
having a colleague that performs better than you raises your own game.
However, lots of managers would not make this call. Why? Ego causes
them to want to be around people who have similar or lower levels of
performance to themselves. When choosing your new network, do not fall
into the ego trap. Remember that you are on a learning curve, and to acquire
the expertise that you need it can be helpful to be around people who have
far greater knowledge and perform much better than you do.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that who we surround ourselves with
determines how we perform. In their 2009 study of cashiers in a US
supermarket chain, Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti provide clear
evidence that people change their level of effort depending on who they are
working with. The researchers found that having an above-average worker
starting their shift increased the effort of the other workers by 1 per cent.
They also found that the high-productivity worker coming on to the floor
only increased the productivity for the co-workers who could see them.
Productivity here was defined as the number of items scanned per second.

Think about the role models and peers you expose yourself
to.

There are two reasons why it is important to do this.

First, the people you surround yourself with will hopefully be sharing
their knowledge with you, so it is important that you seek out those of a
higher ability or who know different things than you do. Don’t worry too
much about being the smartest person in the room. If you are, it probably
means you’re not advancing much.
Second, you are likely to mimic the behaviour of those around you
without realizing it. The people you surround yourself with will expose you
to new norms, and this can cause you to develop new habits.3
One explanation offered by Mas and Moretti for the rise in productivity
observed in the cashiers is social pressure. Social pressure can change
behaviour, as it sets a new normal. There is a reason why children in school
do better if put into classrooms with children who perform better than them.
It’s the same reason why people are more likely to regularly exercise if they
are part of a group. And it’s why we end up working later when we look
around and see that our colleagues aren’t rushing to go home.
We like to follow in the footsteps of those around us. But most of the
time we are not aware that we are following others – instead we think we
are doing things for ourselves.
Identifying the helpful – but also the unhelpful – social norms you
surround yourself with is a useful exercise. What social norms are in place
among the people you spend most of your leisure time with? Do you engage
in activities together that encourage personal growth? Or do you spend the
majority of your time lolling around in front of the TV or on bar stools? Are
you supportive of one another’s ambitions? Or is there jealousy and mean-
spirited competition?

The people we expose ourselves to can change our

behaviour and skills without us even realizing.
 We are the product of those who we surround ourselves with. We mimic
our networks and ingrain new habits as a result. Remember this when
reassessing the list of people you plan to contact and connect with over the
next three months.

INSIGHT 2: DID YOU PICK THE RIGHT BIG-THINKING GOAL?

During my first year at university, I worked in a women’s fashion retail
store. I loved that job because of my fantastic colleagues. It totally eclipsed
all the other part-time jobs I had held previously: butcher’s assistant,
waitress, grocery-store till operator, and personal assistant. I moved my
hours to full-time in the summer after my first year, covering weekend and
evening shifts that nobody else wanted to do, while the rest of my
university friends headed off to travel around the world. I spent a lot of time
merchandising that summer, making the shop look great for its customers,
which although it required concentration of sorts, gave me a meditation-
style sense of calm.
On one of the days when I was helping rearrange the stock on the shop
floor, I had an epiphany. I realized I was not enjoying my computer science
degree at all. There are very few moments in my life, either before or after,
that brought greater clarity. All of a sudden, I knew that I was on the wrong
path!
At this point you may be questioning the big-thinking goal you have
identified. If you are, I am sending you a virtual fist bump because these
doubts are worth speaking about. After all, if cognitive biases crept in and
influenced your choice of mentors – what’s to say your goal isn’t a victim
of the same biases? The truth is, it probably is.
The good news? If you pursue your chosen goal anyway, you will look
back later in life and label it a good choice. This is choice-supportive bias.

When we look back on our choices, we tend to think that they

were the right ones.

We don’t know the reason why people exhibit choice-supportive bias;

however, my gut instinct tells me that it was born out of the need for us to
sleep at night without regret – with a clear conscience about our actions.
Post-choice rationalization allows us to cleanse our minds of our many
transgressions. If you are happy with your goal, you may as well try for it.
 However, for those who want to reflect on their big-thinking goal a little
bit longer, consider the following biases and how they may have affected
your goal choice.
First up, the ambiguity effect. It is worth thinking again about why you
have chosen your specific big-thinking goal. Might you be looking at
options that have a very clear path of progression, rather than exploring
paths which may be less certain? Do you lack information about the options
that are available to you? The ambiguity effect causes people to select a
ME+ option where there is a known likelihood of success, rather than
potentially better options for which the probability of success is less certain.
Or are you simply following in the footsteps of those you surround
yourself with? Are you doing this because you truly want to be doing the
same thing with your life as they are? Or are you succumbing to the
bandwagon effect, which is causing you to jump on your personal social
circle’s bandwagon and choose a similar occupation? It is not an accident
that children often follow their parents into occupations, or choose jobs
more regularly that involve similar tasks to those carried out by their
parents.4 But knowing someone who does a job and enjoys it doesn’t mean
that you will too if you follow in their footsteps.
It’s worth reflecting on the mechanics of your chosen goal. What’s the
day-to-day grind like? Will you really enjoy engaging in the activities
required to get the job done? I have met many an undergraduate at the LSE
who hated studying economics. They are doing it solely because their
parents or teachers have told them they will ‘get a good job afterwards’. In
this case, good job means ‘loads of cash’ or ‘safe’ – rather than ‘loads of
happiness’. In a world where our working lives are longer than ever before,
finding a job that you get some joy out of is important.
On the other hand, there is reactance bias. When I look back with a
critical eye over my own work-life choices, I see its effects all over my CV.
For those of us who don’t like to conform just for the sake of it, the
bandwagon effect can be replaced by reactance bias. For me, it comes into
play when I have an idea that I think is wonderful, and then some kind-
hearted soul tells me it is not the best use of my time at that point in my
career. What happens? I double down in reaction to the do-gooder’s attempt
to constrain my freedom of choice. It is one to watch for: reactance bias
causes a strengthening of resolve for an alternative view, regardless of its
relative advantages. Reactance bias explains why 124,109 people – the
highest number by a large margin – voted for a UK polar research ship to be
called Boaty McBoatface in 2016. For our purposes, it might cause you to
choose a goal that proves a point rather than one that fulfils a passion.

TOP TIP: HOW TO RECTIFY A TENDENCY FOR BIASED

GOAL-SETTING
Consider the big-thinking goal you set in Chapter 2. Recall the
activities that you will be engaged in if you realize that goal.
Will you enjoy doing them day after day until you are ready to
retire?
If you answered ‘yes’, this is fantastic.
If you answered ‘no’, you should revisit Chapter 2 and the
goal-setting process.

INSIGHT 3: LOSS AVERSION

Although I realized in the summer of 1998 that I was on the wrong path
pursuing computer science, it was quite some time until I finally got around
to telling my mum of my intention to find a new path. The delay in this
communication was driven by classic loss aversion.

Loss aversion – and more specifically how we imagine we will

experience losses – has the potential to delay conversations
that would accelerate our journey.

For example, if your goal is to get promoted, and you imagined a

timeline of five years – why is five the magic number? Why not four years?
Or three years? Can you reassess the factors that drove you to establish this
timeline?
For most of us, the promotion criteria we face at work are what an
economist would call ‘noisy’. That means it is hard to say exactly what
needs to be done to get promoted. It is hard to know when you have ticked
the right boxes. The noisier the criteria are, the more often you will see
people getting promoted earlier than expected – and others much later than
expected. Why? Well, to get promoted you need to put yourself forward.
And whether you put yourself forward strongly depends on your level of
risk aversion.
 For most jobs in the day-to-day, your level of risk aversion does not
affect your performance (save for folk defending our streets against crime,
our houses against fire, or betting recklessly on securities on a trading
floor). It is therefore less than ideal that it disrupts people’s career
progression. It is also not ideal that women are typically less risk-averse
than men; highly educated folk are not as risk-averse as less-educated folk;
ethnic minorities are more risk-averse than white individuals in the US; and
the wealthy are less risk-averse than the poor.5 To put it another way, the
door is wide open for rich, white, university-educated males to create an
attainment gap, simply because on average they roll the dice more often and
take a punt as compared to others. It has nothing to do with skills or ability
– it boils down to how comfortable the person feels with risk.
Risk aversion can also affect the type of job a person is likely to apply
for. With any job advert, there is usually a lengthy job criteria list. The
truth? It is really hard for the evaluators to determine whether or not a
person that applies meets the criteria. So how can someone know when they
have made the cut?
Throwing my hat in the ring says more about my levels of confidence
and risk aversion than anything about my ability to do the job. And do you
want to hear something interesting? The correlation between competence
and confidence is super low. Combining more than 150 correlations which
reported on self-rated intelligence (i.e. how confident someone is in their
own ability) and actual intelligence, Alexander Freund and Nadine Kasten’s
2012 study estimates the commonality of these two variables to be just 10
per cent.
But are more confident and risk-loving people wrong to put themselves
forward? Ultimately, the answer is ‘no’. This may irritate you, but they are
acting in their own best interests, given the costs and benefits that they face.
The probability of success is positive – because in any process where the
criteria for success are noisy, there is a positive chance (or probability) of
success when you put yourself forward. It may be tiny, but it is positive.
And for those who aren’t hampered by the anticipatory fear of rejection,
they can roll with the punches that come with failure. They may even get a
rush out of trying to frame their expertise in a way that meets the criteria.
The only cost for this group is the time associated with throwing their hat in
the ring. If this cost is low enough, they will put themselves forward. They
are the kind of person who keeps their CV up to date, after all.
 So why don’t more people embrace a positive probability of success?
The answer is that risk aversion is partially driven by loss aversion. Most
people feel losses more than gains. Furthermore, risk aversion is driven by
anticipatory loss aversion, which is about how painful you expect being
turned down to make you feel.

Anticipating failure is a negative life experience in itself. It is

so powerful that the mere thought of failing can stop people
even trying in the first place.

Risk aversion, loss aversion and low confidence are a dangerous

combination that can stop people moving forward. Women tend to be more
loss-averse than men.6 While the reason for this is unknown, I have a
theory as to why men might be less loss-averse – and it has to do with
dating. Traditionally, when teens begin dating, the majority of the time it is
the boys that have the knee-wobbling job of asking a girl on a date. Very
early on in their development, boys get used to dealing with rejection – and
they come to realize it is not as bad as they expected it to be. This is a
fantastic lesson that will result in some amazing benefits all the way
through life.
Risk-loving, confident people are not going to stop putting their hat in the
ring too early and often. Some organizations try and circumvent this by
having regular feedback sessions, but the sheer number of overly confident
extroverts at the top of those same organizations signals that this system is
less than perfect.7 Of course, if you are freelancing or setting up a
company, there isn’t the luxury of safeguarding by a human resources
department. So if you are an introvert with a caring demeanour, you really
need to do everything that you can to restack the odds in your favour.
 TOP TIP: RESTACKING THE ODDS IN YOUR FAVOUR
1 Reframe putting yourself forward when there is an uncertain
outcome. Remind yourself that the probability of success is
positive. It may be low, but it is always positive.
2 Never focus on the outcome. Focus on your decision-
making process. It is only your decision-making that you
can control.
3 Remember that anticipating failure feels worse than failure
itself. You will always learn something from the process,
even if you fail.
4 Remind yourself that continued exposure to loss aversion
will make you realize that losing isn’t as painful as you
expected it to be. In other words, it will get easier!

INSIGHT 4: KNOW YOUR VALUE

When trying to make a high-stakes decision such as deciding whether or not
to quit your chosen university degree, taking your mind off it can
sometimes help you make a better decision. Although not an activity I
would recommend today to decompress, while pondering my dilemma in
1998 the activity I found myself doing a bit too often was shopping.
Long before I was aware of behavioural science, I became aware of
anchoring while browsing my favourite department store in my home city
of Cork. It was there that I saw the most beautiful black leather bag. I
thought about how it would placate me if I did decide to return to my boring
computer science degree. My thoughts see-sawed back and forth during that
summer – one minute I wanted to do something totally different, the next I
wanted to continue at university. And this bag could carry all the books I
needed for uni if I stayed, along with the notebooks I insisted on carting
around. However, this same beautiful leather handbag carried a price tag of
£500 (Ireland was still some months away from adopting the euro). Then
one day I glimpsed a sign which told me that it was 50 per cent off all
handbags. Do you think that the ‘50 per cent off’ sign caused me to view
the bag as a bargain? Do you think that I would have viewed the bag in
exactly the same way if it had been priced £250 in the first place?
These questions link to the well-established behavioural science concept
of anchoring, in which people over-rely on pre-existing information when
making decisions. So (to use the example of my shopping experience) a bag
priced at £500 with 50 per cent off is perceived to be a better bargain than a
bag originally tagged £250. It also explains why many of us jump online for
those regular flash sales they have these days.
Take a moment to reflect on what drives how much you get paid right
now. Are you being paid your worth? Is anchoring determining how much
you are taking home?

How much we have been paid in the past is a major mental

reference point when we make decisions about how much we
are worth today.

Let’s imagine that Justin is accepting a new job and he’s been asked to
state his salary expectations. Justin is going to give this a lot of thought. He
will take into account the knowledge he has about the firm and the standard
of living he’s hoping to achieve, and he may even get advice from friends
and family. But despite this, his current pay will be one of the main factors
that drives what he asks for. He may end up asking for 10, 20 or even 30 per
cent over this number, but it is still the primary reference point in his
negotiations.
Our current salary is such a powerful anchor that it may even stop us
leaving our current job. This is certainly the case for my friend Cara. Cara
is so obsessed with securing a salary that is better than her current financial
package that she has turned down many opportunities that would help her
get to where she wants to go more quickly. Fair enough, I suppose. Nobody
wants to take a pay cut. But do you want to hear something funny? Cara
hates her job. She barely sleeps or sees her friends, and she doesn’t enjoy
the work she has to do at all. Cara’s anchor is keeping her stuck and
unhappy.
The superpowers of anchoring also imply that it is possible you are being
underpaid. You may be selling your innovative product too cheaply. The
rates you are charging for consultancy work might be too low. And you may
not ask for enough of a raise during your annual review simply because you
are anchored to your current salary.
How can you tackle this? You need to reset your anchors. In some cases,
for example if you are selling a physical product, this will be very easy to
do, as the prices of your competitors are known. For freelancers offering a
service, rates are often not published and they are agreed upon when you
connect with a new client. This means that with each new client there is an
opportunity to reset your anchor. Why not let them suggest the rate, and see
if it is higher than you have previously been charging? Or why not increase
your rate by 5 per cent and monitor the reaction?
If you are working in a large firm, very often the distribution of pay
across job types is published, allowing you to easily compare your salary to
that of your peers. If the pay distribution is not available, this is information
that you can gather from your network and (if you are brave enough) by
pursuing an outside offer. How we are rated within our own firm is affected
by other people’s cognitive biases. The fastest way to blast a fuzzy or
negative perception of you away is to get an outside offer for a job that is
clearly better than your current role. After that? You are due a conversation
with your boss!

INSIGHT 5: WHY DON’T WE ASK FOR WHAT WE NEED MORE

OFTEN?
In the end, I didn’t have to speak to Mum about wanting to drop out of
computer science. Why? I spoke to one of my professors, who was
nicknamed Java James.
The start of my second year was only a few days away, but it was still
tumbleweeds in the corridors of my university. Only Java James’s door was
ajar on the departmental corridor. With stubbornness embedded in my DNA
I sidled up to his office, confident that I was going to quit for sure. Then I
knocked and entered Java James’s office without being called in. No point
wasting any more time … I had the rest of my life to get on with.
‘Ah, Grace,’ he greeted me. ‘How has summer treated you?’
‘It’s been good, Java James – so good that I’ve decided not to return to
university. I didn’t miss computer science while I was away, and I don’t
want to spend time studying something I don’t love.’
‘Love?’ he chuckled, at my announcement. ‘Anything worth learning is
going to be difficult, Grace. You aren’t supposed to love every second of it.
I doubt any of your peers missed class either. We have a hiatus over
summer for precisely that reason: the course is meant to be intense. But
perhaps you’re just not cut out for it.’
I’ve already mentioned that my choices in life have been frequently
shaped by reactance bias – a tendency to show up for something simply
because someone says you should not do it. Perhaps that kicked in.
Whatever it was, Java James’s response grated pretty hard on me given that
I had walked through his door ready to walk off the computer science
course.
‘Of course I’m cut out for it!’ I bristled. ‘It’s just so boring, and I suppose
it is pretty hard to boot. I can’t see myself thriving over the next three
years.’
‘Hmmm, well it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, you know. What do
you want to do instead?’
‘I want to … I don’t know. Can you help?’
Java James talked me through my options and I ended up studying
economics alongside computer science for the rest of my degree. Simply by
asking for help, I got what I needed: a university path that was more suited
to the interests I had at the time.

We don’t ask for help often enough, even when we really

need it.

From getting advice on how to think big to asking for the conditions that
we deserve in the workplace, we often baulk at the idea of that level of
intimacy in a professional conversation. We dislike feeling vulnerable. We
fear the uncertainty of what the response may be, and put it off for too long.
Is the thought of having a conversation with your boss about promotion
filling you with dread? Is the thought of asking for help in accelerating your
goal making you want to cancel the meeting with your mentor? Maybe
broaching the subject of salary anchoring with human resources gives you
goosebumps? Some of us fear that asking will make us look too greedy or
too needy.
Take conversations about increased income. I have heard so many people
relay how much they love their work and how wrong it seems to ask for
more pay. And many owners of small- and medium-sized enterprises avoid
having this conversation with their clients in case they look money-
grabbing. But this is a very upside-down way of looking at the world. When
we go to work each day and produce something of value, we deserve to be
paid at a rate that reflects the value added. Our work is a transaction that
should be mutually beneficial. Leaving money on the floor with your
employer or client is not the right way to think about avoiding greed.
Accept getting paid your worth, and quell any fears that you are being
greedy by paying your taxes and giving to charity.
Or perhaps it is not a fear of greed that is holding you back. Perhaps you
have faith that your boss will let you know when the time is right for any
advancement or pay rise. That they are watching you closely and will
ensure that you get your just deserts. Is this realistic? Not always. It might
be that you are affected by the curse of knowledge. Try and be cognizant of
the fact that when you know something is true, it can be difficult for you to
imagine not knowing it. You think that your boss has the same insights as
you do regarding how good you are. You sit at work all day long and
assume that your manager sees how productive you are, and tailors their
advice appropriately.
The curse of knowledge can also lead to something called the tiara
syndrome. This is the expectation that if you work hard every day, a time
will come when you are rewarded and someone will effectively put a tiara
on your head. But the people who you are relying on to give you this
reward are navigating their own paths in work. They are busy. Perhaps they
themselves are beginning to think big. So it is up to you to draw attention to
your value and your desire to move forward. It is always your responsibility
to ask for what you need in terms of advice and guidance.

It is up to you to join the dots and highlight your progress, to

ensure you are adequately rewarded.

Showing others the progress you are making and where you want to go
will bring more opportunities your way. Better yet, identify opportunities
yourself that are mutually beneficial: remember that it is always best to
understand the perspective of others when making requests for help.

INSIGHT 6: TWO-WAY CONVERSATION

Out of a class of 150+ students, getting individual feedback on my work
during my undergraduate degree wasn’t something that came easily. The
conversation I had with Java James in the summer of 1998 was an outlier,
born out of needing a resolution to my see-sawing (combined with
escalating credit card bills from all the retail therapy I couldn’t afford). By
the second year of my undergraduate degree, we were about sixty students –
a lot had failed and/or dropped out – so it was much easier to get feedback.
Still, it wasn’t necessarily forthcoming. I had to actively seek it out once I
had recommitted to studying computer science.
Back then, just like now, I had little time for people telling me what I did
correctly at length. I preferred critical feedback. I once sought feedback
from a rather nervous teaching assistant on an assessment that had me
design an elevator user interface that could operationalize an elevator in a
department store. He must have talked for twenty minutes about the aspects
of the assessment I had carried out correctly. I don’t recall the exact words
he said, but it was so sweet and light that I tuned out and played circus
music in my head to pass the time. He eventually realized I wasn’t listening,
and asked if there were specific things about the assessment that I wanted to
discuss. He seemed baffled when I responded, ‘Yes, tell me what the awful
parts were!’ with a level of enthusiasm people normally reserve for getting
good news. He rose to the challenge and we spent a much more interesting
twenty minutes tearing apart my assignment.
In Chapter 3, I emphasized the importance of giving yourself regular
feedback as a way to combat a variety of cognitive biases. It is also valuable
to seek feedback from others for the very same reason. Today, I view
feedback as the best mechanism by which to improve, as it allows you to
discover strengths and difficulties in your skills and abilities that you didn’t
know you had – and also how to play to your comparative advantages. I still
prefer to devote more time to critical feedback, but over time I have
recognized the benefits of learning what I am doing right through a fresh
pair of eyes. After all, how else will you know what your comparative
advantages actually are? If I got to choose, I would split feedback time
80:20 in favour of criticism.
The value of seeking feedback from others in terms of promoting
learning and enhancing performance has long been discussed in the
behavioural science literature.8 If you recognize that you are suffering from
anchoring, the curse of knowledge or tiara syndrome, or if you are
hamstrung by loss aversion, actively seeking feedback can be your friend.
Someone who refuses to pursue or listen to feedback offered in a manner
that is non-threatening is someone who should never hold a role where they
interact with or lead people.
If you are serious about progressing over the medium term, seeking
feedback gives you the best chance of achieving your goal. Why? If you ask
the right people for feedback, they can make salient the actions that you
need to take to get ahead quicker, and hold up a mirror to your current blind
spots. This is invaluable.

It is your own responsibility to seek feedback regularly and

with a specific agenda.

Who the best people are to seek feedback from depends on what your
specific big-thinking goal is. If you are staying in a similar role but plan to
accelerate your career, feedback from managers and executives within your
firm is relevant. If you plan to improve the product you are offering in your
business, your current customers and potential new customers are relevant.
If you are changing jobs entirely, people who are currently in a role like the
one you want are worth talking to.
The best feedback that you can get involves a critical aspect, and
highlights the areas in which you need to improve. Don’t expect the person
offering this type of feedback to give you a solution to every problem they
have identified. If they do, that is a bonus, but their job is not to solve the
problems they raise for you. Try not to view critical feedback emotionally.
Depending on the personalities involved, emotions can render the feedback
process redundant. There is a reason why meta-analysis suggests that over
one-third of feedback causes performance decreases.9 So if somebody says
you do something poorly, don’t become overly focused on the fact that you
do something poorly – concentrate instead on what steps you need to take to
improve. Remember that the affect heuristic (when the emotions you are
experiencing at the time influence your decision-making) may determine
how you hear feedback. So if you feel emotional during the process, take
notes and reflect on what was said when you have a cooler head. Assume
that the person giving the feedback had good intentions, and try to see
things from their point of view.
Always approach feedback with an open mind and a thick skin,
regardless of how clumsy the person advising you happens to be with their
words. People who aren’t well versed in the politics of how to deliver
feedback are often the folk who have the most astute comments to make. It
is also important to disentangle content from fluff. Regardless of how the
conversation goes – clumsy or otherwise – every person you meet is still
only one data point. Any criticism raised should be verified by additional
feedback sources or objective data before you go and upend your entire
goal and big-thinking plan.
If you recognize a problem identified in your feedback session as
accurate, make sure to remind yourself that it can be addressed. A problem
in your performance is not a fixed trait, and it can be modified by adjusting
behaviour and actions. Whatever it is, it can be changed with effort.
Do watch out for attentional bias in any feedback session. This is when
your perception of the feedback you are receiving is skewed by whatever is
dominating your mind at that time. In the same way that we are more
sensitive to the smell of bread when we are hungry, you may pay more
attention to any criticism that aligns with your existing view of where your
weaknesses are. Note-taking can help here, as can giving your mentor a
chance to speak freely at the beginning of the session without interruption,
rather than immediately guiding their commentary. Pay attention to whether
their attention is drawn to areas that you don’t necessarily focus on
yourself. Of course, there is no reason to believe that the mentor isn’t also a
victim of attentional bias, but assuming you rely on more than one person
for feedback, this should not pose a major problem.
Feedback from your diverse external network is a golden opportunity for
you to identify elements of your plan that are not working out, and which
need to be refined or sunk. You must avoid the sunk cost fallacy – when
you continue with a plan simply because you have already invested time in
trying to execute it. Academics succumb to the sunk cost fallacy when they
continue to write a paper even after they notice that something nearly
identical has been published elsewhere. Inventors are victims of the sunk
cost fallacy when they continue to invest money in a product, even after
becoming aware that an identical product has already been launched.
Freelancers commit the sunk cost fallacy when they keep chasing a client
who asks for endless meetings but is yet to commission them for any paid
work.
If you receive feedback that causes you to believe that an element of
what you are doing isn’t working, it’s time to reflect on how you can pivot
to what does work. For the academic in the above example, they need to
determine how they can add value compared to the paper that beat them to
the punch. For the inventor, they need to go back to the drawing board and
consider how they will differentiate their product. For the freelancer, they
need to devote their time to approaching and nurturing new client
relationships.
Remember, if you receive feedback that an element of your planning is
futile, it should be verified elsewhere. After all, one person’s opinion does
not a trend make. You also need to remember that these pivots will take
time, and that bad luck happens. But make sure you don’t fall victim to the
ostrich effect – that is, sticking your head in the sand and avoiding negative
information that can ultimately help you.
TOP TIP: HOW TO SEEK FEEDBACK
Start any session by allowing the person giving you feedback
a chance to speak freely without interruption. This could be in
response to a document you sent, or to a short elevator pitch
of what you are trying to accomplish.
Next, ask for very specific feedback on what you are doing
right, and what you should work on – noting that you are
particularly interested in critical feedback. Great feedback
allows you to translate the points raised into workable
objectives. An objective is workable if you will easily know
when you have achieved it. For instance, ‘Get better at time
management’ is hard to track. Whereas ‘Deliver project x by
such-and-such a date’ is very easy.
With positive feedback, a workable objective will allow you
to identify which small steps you should be doing more of. If
you are freelancing and receive positive feedback more than
once on a specific product, you may want to consider
doubling down and making this your speciality. If you are
seeking to be a leader in your organization and receive
positive feedback on the way you ran a meeting, you may
want to self-reflect on what went right so you can make it your
individual style. If you are seeking a career change and your
feedback sessions repeatedly identify the same strengths,
you may want to devote some time to identifying formal ways
that you can signal to a new employer that you have these
strengths on the CV that you submit. Signals of this kind
might be formal qualifications or recognizable work
experience.
For negative feedback, a workable objective will allow you
to identify the small steps you need to focus on to address
gaps or deficiencies in your CV or product. It is also an
opportunity to identify any small steps that you should stop
taking, in order to focus on those that are more likely to get
you to where you need.
Along with approaching feedback with an open mind and a thick skin, it is
worth encouraging the person giving the feedback to move away from
vague statements towards relaying things in a straightforward manner. It is
also helpful to pursue feedback in a timely fashion – when you pass key
milestones like suffering a failure or experiencing a success. Feedback that
is current has been shown to be more effective and more likely to be acted
upon.10

When choosing who to elicit feedback from, the best choices

are people who will encourage your ambition and genuinely
help you rise above any difficulties you might have.

The selection process can involve some trial and error, but if you find
yourself getting feedback that is ill-thought-out, cruel or patronizing, you
can repay the feedback ‘favour’ by not returning for round two. After all,
time is your most precious resource, so it makes sense not to schedule time-
sinkers that will waste it.

INSIGHT 7: SAVING FACE

I finished my computer science and economics degree with excellent
grades. Mum and Dad stood proudly in the auditorium, clapping with
vigour as I graduated. After the event, I was invited to my aunt’s, great-
aunt’s, neighbour’s and even a few random strangers’ houses to celebrate
my achievements.
But the celebrations could have been very short-lived, as I had no
immediate job prospects.
Why? The first reason was that the dot-com bubble had burst, meaning
that jobs in computer science were haemorrhaging rather than being
created. It was hard to stand out in that market with a degree from my local
university in Ireland, and I fully failed to do so.
The second reason was that I had forgotten to apply for all the ‘good’
jobs everyone had told me about, which my economics degree would have
helped me with. These included the civil service, as well as graduate
schemes in major accountancy and banking firms. Here ‘good’ meant
pensionable, with a decent income and a shot at permanency (the golden
trio for many an Irish parent).
 The truth is, the application process for jobs like these happens long
before graduating, and I dropped the ball way before I found myself on that
graduation stage. (In fact, I realized that I should have applied only a couple
of days after the closing date for most of them.) I loved economics deeply.
But like friendships that come naturally or an established long-term
romantic relationship, it didn’t scream for attention as it all felt intuitive to
me. I wasn’t paying attention to the career options it opened up. And so I
had missed all the key deadlines.
My need to save face in front of other people – and not admit to failing as
a fully functioning adult who takes responsibility for themselves – meant
that I never willingly asked for help. I sat with knots in my stomach for ten
long weeks, wondering what to do. At that time, I had a job as a temporary
assistant to the vice president at my university in Cork. It sounds important,
but in reality I just worked Fridays to cover one of the other employees who
was working flexibly. As bosses go, he was a good one. He was intelligent,
enjoyed a joke and was keen to expand my network at the university.
Through him, I would get to know the head of the economics department,
who in the middle of my self-pity parade made the mistake of reminding me
how adding economics to my undergraduate degree insulated me from
market fluctuations in technology. My reaction? I broke down and
confessed to having missed all of the deadlines associated with this career
insurance policy. Unruffled, he suggested I apply for a master’s in
economics with a scholarship, as the application process was still open.
My need to save face had held me back for a while, but then this
impromptu meeting with an unexpected mentor opened things up. Without
this lucky meeting, I probably would have continued to save face and been
stressed and idle … but instead I stood on the graduation stage able to
reciprocate my parents’ enthusiasm. I didn’t have a job, but I felt pretty
good about my decision to read for a master’s degree in economics. Of
course, we cannot rely on luck to give us mentors when we need them. It is
always safer to rely on our own efforts and find them for ourselves!
More often than not, the saving face effect will cause us to slow down
our personal development. Saving face is tangled up with anticipated loss
aversion, but I like to disentangle them.
Anticipated loss aversion refers to the fear you expect to feel from a loss.
For example, how you expect to feel personally if you do not get a
promotion. Meanwhile, the saving face effect refers to the judgement you
expect to get from others when you experience a loss. It’s about what you
expect other people to think about you when you do not get a promotion.
We often hold ourselves back simply because we are concerned about
what other people will think and say about us.
Consider Nora, who is an extraordinarily talented creative who works in
product development. Her job is to generate ideas that innovate and push
the frontiers of what her firm offers their customers. And you know what?
She is great at her job. But she works in an industry where the fast pace
means that nobody is going to take her by the hand and walk her through
the promotion process. You want to know something else? Nora is
chronically under-confident. Again, the pace of her industry means that
people are not telling her how wonderful she is all the time. If you stopped
her colleagues in the corridor and asked them, you would hear a near-
unanimous agreement that she is worth her weight in gold. Yet if you talk to
Nora about her inertia, the reason she identifies is not wanting to face her
colleagues in the café if (she would say ‘when’) she fails. I kid you not!
For all of us, a public rejection – meaning a rejection in front of
colleagues, friends or family – hurts many more times than one experienced
in private. Why is that? Why do people worry about what their neighbours
will think if their marriage breaks down? Why do we find it hard to face our
colleagues if we didn’t get promoted as planned? For those of us who want
to lose a few pounds, why is the idea of other people seeing us exercising in
our gym gear enough to keep us at home?
It took me a long time to figure out that telling someone who cares about
you that you got turned down for something that was important to you is
pretty comforting. I think I was scarred from years in a school where if you
didn’t get something right the teachers did their best to draw attention to
your agony. These days, I have a circle of confidants who make me feel
better when I fail. Folk who make you feel bad about the failures you
experience don’t deserve to hear about them. Seriously, **** them. Anyone
who makes you feel bad about putting yourself out there, rocking the boat
or taking a shot at something is not going to genuinely cheer you on.
To manage these people, who unfortunately are sometimes unavoidable,
where possible you should fail silently. Let them know about the promotion
only when you get it. Put your hat in the ring for a job where the criteria are
just out of reach, and don’t tell them. Let trusted confidants only into your
plans, and reduce the saving face effect by reducing the number of people
who know what you are up to.
But sometimes we cannot fail silently. You may need to pitch for
investors in front of a crowd, or run for election, or take part in an open
tournament. Or perhaps an activity you really need to nail is public
speaking. You can’t very well do this by talking into a hairbrush alone in
your bedroom. So what then?
First, take some comfort in knowing that people do not pay as much
attention to you as you may think – we stand out in our own minds, so we
often have a mistaken belief that we also hold the attention of others far
more intensely and much more often than we actually do.
This is called the spotlight effect, a term coined by behavioural scientist
Thomas Gilovich. He and his colleagues demonstrated that, even if you are
feeling embarrassed and are filled with certainty that everyone notices your
anxiety, the reality is very different. People are self-involved and too caught
up with their own needs to pay you much attention.11

You are not in the spotlight as often as you think.

Don’t be disappointed by this. It is very freeing to realize that your

mistakes and failures are noticed less often than you fear. And it’s time you
made some more.
Embrace the reality of the spotlight effect and don’t let the image of how
you want to be seen in public stop you doing things that can advance your
plans. If you have messed up, like I did by not applying for jobs in
university, seek advice from those you trust and brainstorm a solution to
help you move forward.

INSIGHT 8: REMAINING OPEN TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Today at the LSE I am surrounded by people who have tales that describe
their calling to academia. I read applications from people yearning to come
and read for a PhD on our famous London campus. I always admire people
who have a clear idea of what their career path will be. But my path to
academia was slightly different.
After graduating from my MSc in economics, I received a job offer for a
research fellow role at Trinity College Dublin. The job itself was appealing
for a number of reasons – I would get to work with large data sets to hone
my data modelling skills, the hours were flexible, and I would have
extraordinarily high levels of autonomy. It was located slap bang in the
middle of Dublin (a decidedly cosmopolitan city which is small enough to
get to know but large enough to retain a degree of anonymity), and I would
travel to London a lot to spend time at a collaborating university. The
problem? The salary was poor, and rents in Dublin were high. In August
2005, I had to make a hard phone call to Professor Normand, who had
offered me the job.
‘Professor Normand, many thanks for letting me know that I had a
successful interview,’ I began. ‘I’ve been thinking about the offer over the
last few days, but the salary is way too low to allow me to live and work in
Dublin given the current rents. I was wondering, is there any room to adjust
the income north a little way?’
‘Grace. I didn’t lie when I said that there is no room to manoeuvre your
salary,’ he replied. ‘I would if I could. But I do think this job is a great
opportunity for you. It’s too good to miss, really. So while I can’t increase
your earnings, I can allow you to do a PhD in economics, fees paid, while
you’re here. Would that help get us to where we need to be?’
I had never thought about doing a PhD until that moment.
How should you approach opportunities that arise out of the blue? You
can start by being aware of how omission bias and action bias affect your
decision-making process on these occasions.
Omission bias and action bias work in opposite ways.12 Omission bias
causes us to judge activities that do us harm as much dumber than inactivity
that harms us just as much. Not taking action does not usually give us
sleepless nights, as we have not taken any risks and have maintained the
status quo. It is a form of psychological inertia. Standing still is preferred.
In contrast, action bias can be summed up as ‘nothing ventured, nothing
gained’ – we simply take action, whether or not it is the right decision.
The behavioural science evidence convinces me that whether we
encounter omission bias or action bias in our decision-making is down to
both the context and the individual. The behavioural science literature on
regret also distinguishes between how people think about action and how
they think about inaction. Looking backwards on their life, someone is
much more likely to regret not doing something, as opposed to taking
action.13 This evidence relates to a wide variety of populations and
contexts, suggesting that your ME+ will worry more about you suffering
from omission bias than action bias. Or, to put it another way, you can
expect to worry less about what you do than about what you don’t do. Why
is that, when they can both harm you equally?
According to psychologists Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich,14 when
people do something that they regret they have an opportunity to react,
which probably reduces the intensity of the regret they feel when they look
back on it. There is nothing to react to if you stand still and the
opportunities that come up over the course of your life simply slip away. Of
course, you can’t say yes to everything either. By all means be discerning
when considering the options available. Just remember that opportunities
that come up out of the blue are best mulled over with a cool head.
Want to know something wonderful? When you do take advantage of
unexpected opportunities, the odds are stacked in your favour that you will
end up satisfied with the decision in the future. We are pretty damn good at
finding ways to justify our actions, no matter how badly we fail –
processing them in a way that allows us to sleep soundly at night. We find
the silver linings in failures.
But there’s no silver lining in doing nothing and standing still. So more
often than not, you may as well do it, as you’re likely to figure out a way
not to regret it in the future.
This is why you should pay particular attention to omission bias when
opportunities arise out of the blue. Particularly if they show promise of
accelerating your journey, or even of putting you on a previously
unimagined trajectory. And omission bias is also relevant elsewhere. Many
of us have friends who hate their job but never quit.
Many of us know someone who would make a convincing entrepreneur
but will not pursue their dream for fear of failure. Every day, people avoid
having hard conversations, they don’t ask for help, and they baulk at
sticking their neck out to advance their own careers, for no other reason
than a preference not to act.
You don’t have to take risks all the time to succeed, but you do have to
commit to regular small steps. And you can now add to that a resolve to
seriously consider any new opportunities that come along.

INSIGHT 9: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND GROW

There’s a lot more to a PhD than most potential students realize. Including
me. You have to find an academic voice, and contribute ideas that are
creative enough to get published in international journals that are highly
regarded. You need to communicate your ideas at public speaking events
with large (often scathing) academic audiences. Depending on what you are
studying, you may have to hone skills in data science, maths, deductive
reasoning, interviewing, writing, communicating, teaching … the list goes
on.
This is how, in the summer of 2007, I found myself in a large auditorium
at New York University, discussing one of my PhD papers in front of more
than a dozen esteemed professors of econometrics. I take creative licence in
using the word ‘discussing’ because on that day I choked. I stumbled over
my words, stuttering, sweating, forgetting what I had to say …
I had thrown my hat in the ring. I had taken a risk. But I had failed.
It was important that I recognized my own part in this failure. I had never
invested any real time in developing my presentation skills.
It happens. We don’t always nail it the first time. Sometimes we mess up.
But when we do, it’s essential that we don’t succumb to self-serving bias,
which is the tendency to take kudos for positive outcomes and lay the blame
for failures at someone else’s door. Don’t point to bad luck or even
skulduggery for failure. Remind yourself that any moment of failure is a
good time for self-reflection. Were you responsible?
But is self-serving bias always a bad thing? Possibly not on occasions
when you need to rally quickly. It is certainly a way we can post-rationalize
our choices to ensure we get an appropriate amount of sleep at night. It is
also, at its core, an act of self-preservation. It helps avoid paralysis in the
future when we need to put ourselves out there again.
However, the problem with self-serving bias on occasions like my horror-
show presentation is that we miss an opportunity to self-reflect when a
genuine failure occurs. It may also cause us not to develop the new skills
we require to move on. I needed to work on my presentation skills – I
couldn’t blame that on circumstance. If we do not self-reflect, how can we
know what to improve for next time around?
Self-serving bias may have influenced the skills and traits that you
committed to developing in Chapter 2. Did you pick the skills that you
already have as the ones that you need to develop? Were you puffing up
your ego by emphasizing the value of qualities you already have, and
neglecting to notice skills you don’t have but really need?
 A study by Jeffrey Cucina and colleagues from 2005 illustrates this
nicely. They asked participants to identify the personality traits that are
necessary to ensure academic success. And what did they find? A
significant overlap between the student’s own personality and the
personality dimensions they chose as important. Another study by Rory
McElwee and colleagues from 2001 came to a similar conclusion. In their
work, they led participants to falsely believe that they were talented at
either maths or verbal skills. (Scientists can be deceptive!) Then they
showed them a bunch of college applications and asked them to rank each
applicant in terms of suitability for college. What did they find? That the
study’s subjects were far from objective – showing strong preferences for
applicants they believed were most like themselves (remember, they were
falsely led to believe they were skilled in specific subjects) rather than
choosing the legitimately best candidates.
So do you think you are overemphasizing the skills you are already
strong in as those to cultivate for your big-thinking journey? Are you
unsure? It is a question you could ask your new network. Specifically, ask
them what the most important traits would be for ME+ to cultivate.
Compare their responses to the traits that you decided to develop, and
swallow your pride if revisions need to be made.

Don’t let ego stand in the way of your progression.

Get out there and hone the skills ME+ actually needs. You may have
some bad experiences on your new learning curve, like me choking at
NYU, but it is all part of the journey!

INSIGHT 10: DON’T FORGET TO BREATHE OUT

I completed my PhD successfully in September 2009. I did my viva (an oral
examination) on a Thursday, and left to go backpacking around South-East
Asia the following Sunday. Prior to this I had also secured a tenured
lecturing job in Australia, which would start in October. In the run-up to
that period, I had been on fire in terms of my research productivity. I had
everything figured out.
Well, sort of.
I had used up all of my willpower to finish my PhD early so I could make
it to Australia and honour the tight start date I had agreed. As I sat drinking
the complimentary prosecco on my Qantas Airways flight, eagerly
anticipating a new adventure in Thailand, I was wearing elasticated
tracksuit bottoms. But this wasn’t to ensure a comfortable long-haul flight.
Rather, I had gained two stone in the final two months of my PhD. It had
been too hard to muster the willpower to be healthy after consistently
slogging away for fourteen hours a day for more than six months, and my
body and my energy levels had taken a hit.
Remember that your journey to ME+ is a marathon, and not a sprint. It
can happen that you fall into a sustained level of intensity on the course of
your journey that doesn’t allow for other things in your life, and this throws
your balance off. Take notice of where you are using up your energy and
willpower, as these things are not infinite in supply.
Behavioural scientists call the phenomenon of sacrificing willpower in
one area of life for another ego depletion. The literature also provides
evidence that it can be offset with morale-boosting treats or activities.15 If
you don’t pay attention to ego depletion, good behaviour in one area of life
(like taking small steps towards your big-thinking goal) can cause bad
behaviour in other areas (like eating healthily), as you don’t have the energy
to do both.
Think of willpower as a muscle that needs to be exerted. Through
exertion, willpower weakens. It can be replenished, but it takes time. The
lesson here? Identify some treats and activities that will give you a boost
when you are feeling depleted. These might include a massage, walks in the
park, a timeout to meditate, a freshly brewed cup of an exotic herbal tea, or
an episode of your favourite TV show alongside (in moderation) chocolate,
booze or whatever else tickles your fancy. Having an arsenal of treats at
your disposal is better than relying on just one thing.
If you see yourself sliding into bad behaviour in another area of your life
because you are intensely working on your big-thinking goal, it is worth
taking the small step to schedule one of these treats to help avoid ego
depletion.
So let’s recap the ten behavioural science insights covered in this chapter
…
INSIGHT 1: BIASES IN YOUR NETWORKS AND
INFLUENCERS
Go back to the list of three people you came up with to
expand your network in Chapter 2 (see p. 54), and ensure
that they are sufficiently diverse.

INSIGHT 2: DID YOU PICK THE RIGHT BIG-THINKING

GOAL?
Can you say for sure that the activities that you love doing
define your ultimate stated goal?

INSIGHT 3: LOSS AVERSION

Don’t let the way you think about failure stop you from putting
your hat in the ring. Remind yourself that there is always a
positive probability of success.

INSIGHT 4: KNOW YOUR VALUE

Research how much other people that are doing jobs like you
are earning (your market rate), to help deal with anchoring on
rates that are too low and ensure you’re getting paid what you
are worth.

INSIGHT 5: WHY DON’T WE ASK FOR WHAT WE NEED

MORE OFTEN?
Don’t assume that the people around you are noticing your
progress. They are busy. Join the dots for them and highlight
your development to ensure you are adequately rewarded.

INSIGHT 6: TWO-WAY CONVERSATION

Approach feedback opportunities strategically. Develop a
thick skin and be open to critical feedback. When you receive
feedback you don’t agree with, remind yourself it is one data
point, and take the time to verify it with other sources.

INSIGHT 7: SAVING FACE

Avoid the saving face effect by recognizing that, regardless of
whether you fail or succeed at something, very few people will
 notice, and if they do it will be short-lived.

INSIGHT 8: REMAINING OPEN TO NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Take opportunities that come out of the blue seriously.
Remind yourself that people always regret inaction more than
action.

INSIGHT 9: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND GROW

Don’t blame others or cosmic injustice for any failures that
may occur. Take the time to reflect honestly on whether a lack
of effort on your part or perhaps poor decision-making led to
the bad outcome.

INSIGHT 10: DON’T FORGET TO BREATHE OUT

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Make efforts to avoid ego
depletion by scheduling well-being enhancing treats after
intense periods of concentration or dedication.

Don’t be discouraged when you realize just how many biases you need to
watch out for. Remember that while a lot of these biases operate
unconsciously, they are not fixed. Using the behavioural science insights
highlighted in this chapter can limit the influences of your cognitive biases
on your big-thinking journey and stop you holding yourself back.

Happy de-biasing!
Before we move on, make sure that you:
Slow down and recognize that most of the decisions you make
are affected by cognitive biases and blind spots.
Read through the ten behavioural science insights and adopt
some of these tips and tricks, in order to reduce the impact of
biases and blind spots on your big-thinking journey.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER:

1 Bias blind spot: The tendency to see ourselves as less

affected by biases than other people are.

2 Choice-supportive bias: When we look back on our

choices, we tend to think that they were the right ones.

3 Anticipatory loss aversion: This relates to how painful you

expect being turned down to make you feel.

4 Ostrich effect: Sticking your head in the sand and avoiding

negative information that can ultimately help you.

5 Self-serving bias: The tendency to take kudos for positive

outcomes, and lay the blame for failures at someone else’s
door.
 CHAP T E R 5

Outside

I met Alex after a public talk in 2018. Rather than asking me loads of
questions on biases and other behavioural-science-related matters that
linked to my talk, Alex jumped right in and started describing a new
product idea.
Alex was an extraordinarily enthusiastic individual, filled with
entrepreneurial spirit. Alex also talked at me rapidly, blissfully unaware that
I was zoning out. I captured some soundbites that told me Alex was certain
that this product was mass-market. These included, ‘Every person needs it!’
and, ‘Parents will love it!’ Something was also said about weight loss, and
something else about bulking up. In a nutshell, Alex was seeking world
domination.
But then Alex kept talking. It was now getting to the time in the evening
where I should be making my exit, but despite scanning the room
repeatedly I couldn’t see my coat. It was getting harder and harder to
concentrate on this uninvited monologue. That’s until one sentence snagged
in my brain – ‘I’ll show them all, they’re wrong!’ – to which my knee-jerk
response was: ‘What people exactly?’
Alex’s story turned out, in the end, to be pretty interesting. But I only
realized this once I turned my attention more fully to what was being said,
and turned (or rather forced) it into a conversation rather than a speech.
Alex had been pitching a new product idea to syndicates of angel
investors all over London. Something was working because Alex had
secured meetings with more than twenty groups of very busy people.
Despite being turned down repeatedly, Alex still had enough energy left to
keep pushing. That in itself was very admirable. The problem? Alex wasn’t
listening to feedback.
The feedback received at these meetings was remarkably similar across
all of the groups. So what was it? Well, they’d all said that while the
product idea was creative, Alex was too disorganized to pull it off. I could
have had an hour of my life back if I’d been told this to start with.
I looked at my watch. ‘Alex, we’ve been speaking for almost an hour
after you declared that you’re going to show everyone just how wrong they
are. I can hear your enthusiasm about your business idea, but how will you
prove to them that you aren’t disorganized?’
This totally stumped Alex. I took the brief silence to say my goodbyes,
and made my exit.
I have already used the old adage, ‘If everyone says you are dead, lie
down.’ It is one of my favourites, and it definitely applied to Alex. Alex
was ignoring really valuable feedback on being disorganized from more
than twenty different groups of people, and being held back by a blind spot.
But the blind spot didn’t belong to other people. It belonged to Alex.
The key factor here is that Alex had elicited feedback from (far) more
than one person or group, and they were independent of each other. In other
words, it wasn’t just a case of a few people taking a dislike to Alex and
going to town.
The really sad part? Alex had wasted so many valuable opportunities in
front of credible future funders by not taking feedback seriously and
addressing it. You’d think by the fifth, or even the tenth presentation, the
penny would have dropped.
And as a critique, being called disorganized isn’t even all that bad. It can
be easily fixed. The solution can also be outsourced. A more organized
partner can be brought to the table, or Alex could have employed a personal
assistant. Maybe it was Alex’s ego that was getting in the way. Even in our
short tête-à-tête, it was obvious that Alex needed to listen more. Or maybe
Alex was truly too disorganized to take in the feedback. Either way, Alex
was being blocked by an inability to address the only thing that made Alex
a bad investment choice. Alex was self-sabotaging. Alex clearly needed
Chapter 4!
All of us at one time or another won’t get out of our own way. We are
held back by our biases and blind spots. I see cases of useable feedback
being ignored time and time again! An executive assistant who is repeatedly
given feedback that their communication skills need some work, insists that
all the naysayers are against them. They stagnate. A junior manager
working in retail whose staff give them feedback that there is a better way
to do the rota, with no negative effect on customers, refuses to listen and
leaves their staff’s morale in the gutter. A leader is told every year that they
intimidate their colleagues; they tell their colleagues to grow up. A school-
leaver being offered advice on their university choices declines to listen.
Yes – all around the world, great advice gets cast aside by people who keep
doing the same thing and somehow expect a different outcome.
However, it is not just your own cognitive biases and blind spots standing
in your way.

How people see you may not reflect your abilities, skills and
talent at any one moment in time.

Others may hold a different narrative about your suitability for jobs,
leading projects or heading up a company, and this narrative may relate to
factors that have nothing to do with your capability to do the task at hand.
Even if you have developed a keen self-awareness of what you can offer, do
not expect this to match the belief that others hold about you. Other people
see you differently from how you see yourself, and their own cognitive
biases and blind spots tint their view.
So why does this matter?
At any one time, you know many people in the world. How each of those
people views you differs. How do I know? It is easy to demonstrate, when
you think about people in the public domain. Take Donald Trump. His
presidency in the US has been plagued by contradictory narratives. Some
people view him as a superhero, here to bring American jobs back to the US
from far-flung shores. The ultimate warrior against globalization and the
establishment. For others, Trump is an incompetent bully, crossing
boundaries at every given opportunity and setting America back decades.
These narratives, although totally contradictory, are held at the very same
point in time by different people. They co-exist, and are espoused by the
two sides as if they are facts. These narratives cause fights around dinner
tables. These narratives divide nations.
Try it yourself. Think of someone in the public domain who you think is
perfect in each and every way.1 Now google ‘I hate [insert name here]’,
and you will see plenty of evidence that other people hold the exact
opposite narrative to you. The fact that you are seeing so many webpages
with negative comments tells you that people are even willing to pay a cost
– time – to vent their frustrations. As I emphasized earlier, time is our most
precious resource. Those people have spent their most precious resource
telling the world how much they hate this person you like.
So should you care if people differ in their opinion of you? As a flippant
response, it is very easy to say ‘no’, you shouldn’t. Sod them! Why should
you care about the sentiment of someone else when you have big thinking
and small steps to be getting on with? You know who you are – and if they
don’t see it, stuff them!
But what if the person – or persons – with the biases and blind spots can
influence your progress? What if they can derail your planning altogether?
This can happen if the people who will review your work do not accurately
see your skills, abilities and talents. It can happen if the people who will
determine whether you get investment, a gig or a stretch assignment do not
accurately assess your capabilities, potential, or the value you can add.
This chapter will help you identify big moments when the behavioural
biases and blind spots of others are likely to get in your way. If I met you
and you were the manager, leader or owner of an organization, we would
have a conversation about how you should change structures and processes
in your place of work, so that such biases do not disrupt the progression of
talent. If you were an investor, we would discuss structures and processes
that would allow you to navigate the same types of biases and blind spots in
others, to ensure your investment choices give you the highest return. But in
this case, I am going to take the behaviour of the other person as a given,
and provide you with advice for navigating it. This is not satisfactory for
those of us who want to live in a more socially responsible and equitable
world, and once you make some real progress on your journey you will be
in a better place to challenge and change structures that you do not like or
that are unfair, thereby ensuring that those coming up behind you have to
worry less. But for now, the behavioural science insights I outline in this
chapter will focus on tools that allow you to circumvent the biases and blind
spots of others and give yourself the best shot of realizing your big thinking
sooner rather than later.
But before we get to these insights, it is worth spending a little bit of time
trying to understand how the behavioural biases of others manifest in the
first place. Like many unhelpful phenomena, there is not one single cause,
and nor are the causes mutually exclusive. Let’s take a moment and explore
the three main causes …
 UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
There are many people who deny they see the world with biases and blind
spots. If I am speaking to a group of a manageable size, I often try an
experiment to illustrate this. I managed to do this pretty successfully about a
year ago, with a group of around forty people who worked in IT. Each
person in attendance sat at a table of two. Seating was randomly assigned,
based on a list of names I received before the event. I let the group know
that their task was to prove their skills of negotiation and that there was
£100 at stake.2
Within each pair, roles were assigned. One person was the proposer.
Their job was to write on a piece of paper how much they were willing to
give their partner out of the £100. At the same time, their partner – the
responder – wrote down the minimum offer they would accept. In this
situation the proposer wants to get as close as possible to the minimum
acceptable offer, to prove they are master negotiators. Too low and there is
no deal – and neither the proposer nor responder receive anything. Too
high, and the proposer is giving away money unnecessarily.
However, I was being ever so slightly sneaky. In reality, I didn’t care who
was a master negotiator. I was trying to find out if people would be treated
differently by some observable characteristic like gender, age or whether
they were wearing a suit. Would the proposers consistently offer less to
certain groups of people?
Within this group of IT professionals, unconscious bias was clearly
revealed. On average, male responders were offered more. (It should be
noted that both male and female proposers offered more to men.) Older
responders also garnered more generous offers. This held true no matter the
age of the proposer. And yes, those who were wearing smart clothes also
received more generous offers.
Why?

You might not think you judge on looks, but you do. The fact
that you don’t think you do is why it’s unconscious bias.

There are many published academic studies that draw the same
conclusions with sample sizes that allow for credible statistical analysis.
One study focused on gender, and had two distinct scenarios.3 In the first
scenario, the proposer and responder cannot see or hear each other.
Therefore gender is invisible. In the second scenario, the responder and
proposer sit opposite each other, as in my exercise with the IT
professionals, so they are aware of one another’s gender and the pair get to
exchange pleasantries.
The findings? Regardless of the scenario, the average proposer offer did
not depend on the responder’s gender. Fantastic! The second result was
more troubling, and consistent with my own findings. The responder was
usually offered more when they were male. The third headline result? Male
responders often got the best offers from female proposers.
This is a pretty neat way to illustrate the potential for individuals to be
treated differently because of visible aspects of themselves (for example,
gender, race, age or presentation) that do not correlate with the things that
actually matter: skills, ability and talent.
‘So what?’ you may be asking. ‘This is all low-stakes stuff, right? No one
is getting hired or fired. No life-changing opportunities are forgone.’
Not true. There is enough evidence from high-stakes field experiments to
convince me that this is something which could, for instance, seriously
disrupt your big-thinking journey. Other people’s unconscious bias is
something to take seriously.
Consider the stock of knowledge that has come from CV experiments.
Here, the basic idea is to send CVs in response to real job adverts, randomly
varying the name that appears on the top. For example, by gender to test
whether males are more likely to get picked than females. Choosing names
with a particular ethnic origin demonstrates whether screeners have an
unconscious preference for candidates with a particular ethnicity.
One of the most influential CV studies was carried out by Marianne
Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. In 2004, they sent out 5,000 CVs in
response to 1,300 job adverts in Boston and Chicago. They randomly
assigned African-American- or white-sounding names to these CVs, to test
whether ethnicity mattered for callbacks. What did they find? The fictitious
white CVs received 50 per cent more calls for face-to-face interviews.
What’s more, this stark favouritism for the candidates with white-sounding
names was found across all occupations, industries and firm sizes.
Experiments based on fictitious CVs have also provided convincing
evidence that people are discriminated against for being too old, being a
woman, and being a woman of child-bearing age.4
 But surely, you cry, things have moved on in the last fifteen years? I’m
not wholly convinced they have. Meaningful gaps are still being found in
more recent work, too. A study in the UK, published in 2019 and conducted
by the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, Oxford,
highlights this dismal fact. The study included candidates from thirty-three
different minority ethnic groups who were randomly assigned to different
job vacancies. The findings? White applicants received one call for
interview for every four applications sent. For other ethnicities, the number
dropped to one in seven.
Still don’t believe me? There is even more evidence that people may be
treated differently for reasons that have nothing to do with ability, skills and
talent. Combining twenty-four labour market experimental studies in a
meta-analysis in 2017, Lincoln Quillan and colleagues illustrated that since
1989 there has been no decrease in the discrimination against African
Americans in the United States. A very well-known study by Claudia
Goldin and Cecilia Rouse illustrated that the adoption of ‘blind’ auditioning
by US orchestras in the 1970s and ’80s increased the probability that a
woman advanced to selection rounds by 50 per cent. In a study that I carried
out with David Johnston in 2016, we presented evidence strongly
suggesting that, in times of recession, non-white workers are losing their
jobs more than white workers because of racially prejudiced employers and
managers.
In times of scarcity all workers are more likely to rely on creating in-
groups (an exclusive group of co-workers that share information,
opportunities and comradeship) to keep them safe from losing their job.
Quite often, in-groups are created around characteristics that have nothing
to do with skills, ability or talent, so they are bad news for organizations.
What is more, the creation of in-groups is often unconscious.

REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC
In the opening paragraphs of this chapter I introduced you to Alex, the
wannabe start-up rock star who was refusing to listen to feedback. The
person who cornered me to tell me how great their new product idea was.
The person who had blown twenty pitches for funding … (If you are not
with me, take a moment now to flick back a few pages.)
 Got it? Did you come up with an image of Alex in your mind when you
read that story? Pause. Notice the gender, age and any other attributes you
conjured up for this person?
Now take a moment to reflect on your choices.
Was your image of Alex a man? If it looks like a duck and walks like a
duck …
Guess what? Alex is a woman!
When we judge the probability that a person belongs in a particular job
simply by looking at the degree to which that person resembles the majority
of people already in that job, we are employing the representativeness
heuristic. In this case ‘resembles’ might mean a shared gender, age,
ethnicity, or any other attribute that can be inferred upon first meeting a
person: their levels of extroversion, for instance, or how organized they are.
Consider the following: Jess is a movie buff who enjoys attending film
festivals around the world. Growing up, he enjoyed putting on one-man
plays and entertaining his family members and friends.
Which of the following statements is most likely? ‘Jess is a film critic for
a major newspaper’ OR ‘Jess works in banking.’
In the same way that many readers will have assumed that Alex is a man,
a large share of readers will naturally assume that Jess is a film critic.
Why? Because Jess’s description matches the stereotypes many of us
hold about film critics far more than the stereotypes we hold about bankers.
In reality, Jess is most likely working in banking because employment in
banking makes up a far larger share of jobs in the world and in any country
in which you happen to be reading this. There just aren’t that many film
critics, and plenty of bankers are movie buffs on the sly.
And why will many of you assume that Alex is a man? Because
entrepreneurs are more often male.5 I didn’t tell you Alex’s gender, so you
likely made an assumption based on the representativeness heuristic. We all
use mental shortcuts to make judgements and inferences. In this case the
mental shortcut relies on you having a stereotypical image in mind of what
an entrepreneur should look like. You rely on your image of what an
entrepreneur is from your past encounters with entrepreneurs, or how they
are represented on TV. This is not problematic here, as Alex is blissfully
unaware and, so far as I know, you cannot hurt her future prospects.
However, the representativeness heuristic is problematic in high-stakes
decision-making, and can affect your big-thinking journey by causing
people to judge your suitability – whether you have a particular ability,
talent or skill – on unrelated characteristics that you possess.

STATISTICAL DISCRIMINATION
I met Julie at a lunchtime roundtable that discussed the behavioural science
lessons for honing resilience. Julie had emailed me ahead of time and asked
that we get a coffee afterwards. What keeps the memory of Julie in my
mind is that she suggested a walk-and-talk coffee so we could get some
fresh air and I could make my way to my next destination (in other words,
she made it easier for me). Julie ended up walking me the two miles to the
LSE campus. On the way, we took in some London sights and she told me
about coming back to the office seven weeks ago, after two months’
maternity leave. Yes – not a typo! – two months. Julie had been working on
the day she went into labour and delivered Jack at a healthy 7 lbs 2 oz. She
had planned to take only four weeks, which turned out to be a classic
planning fallacy, and delayed her return by a few weeks to allow herself to
recover and get into a regular breastfeeding routine. At that point, Jack was
being taken care of by Julie’s mum, and Julie returned to her job ready to
throw herself back into serving clients and generating money for her firm.
But Julie’s clients had been reallocated while she was away, and there
was a reluctance from her colleagues to give them back. This wasn’t totally
unexpected. Julie had seen it happen before. She could also see why. Her
colleagues were rewarded based on how much income they brought in, so
pinching lucrative clients could bring them benefits.
Julie had been prepared to have a strongly worded conversation with her
manager to get her client assignments back, but she was not expecting the
soft-toned approach she got instead. Julie’s manager Helen reminded her
that most women in their company took six months’ maternity leave, and
while it was great that she was back, she was not expected to perform to the
same level given her new commitments at home. Helen recommended that
Julie slow down and take on a supporting role to her colleagues.
Julie had become a victim of statistical discrimination. Helen had
assumed that the preferences of a group (other new mothers in the same
firm) would apply to Julie. But Julie wasn’t like the other mothers at her
firm.
 If I asked you to tell me five things that describe somebody you just met,
you would likely describe their age, gender and ethnicity, plus a couple of
things about their appearance (scruffy or dapper, hair colour, facial hair,
etc.).

Statistical discrimination implies that at the very same time

that you’re registering hair colour and sartorial choices, you
are making unconscious assumptions about a person’s
character based on the things that you see.

For example, it is a stylized fact that women take more time out of the
labour force than men because they rely on maternity leave when they have
children and also take on more responsibilities in the home environment. So
people may then assume that Jane is likely to do the same. In the UK, on
average, black people receive a lower level of education than white people,
so people may incorrectly assume that Frank has a relatively low education
level.
Why does this matter? It matters to Jane if an interview panel makes
these assumptions. The job may go to John, who they expect to take less
time off. It matters to Frank if people at a networking event make these
assumptions because they may not invest their time in talking to him.
When I teach at the LSE I like to differentiate occasions of statistical
discrimination from stereotype discrimination. Jane and Frank are being
unfairly held back because of what Arlie Hochschild called the ‘second
shift’ in her 1989 book of the same name and because of inequality in the
British education system, respectively. These averages are then being
applied to them without pause for thought.
The evidence of these inequalities can be seen in data. However, it is also
possible for false stereotypes to affect groups as well. A false stereotype is
one that is applied to a group with no data to back it up. For example,
unfounded beliefs about ability differences in maths between the genders
undoubtedly affect career outcomes. Boys are considered to be better than
girls at maths. Are these differences supported in the data? Definitely not!
Biases are formed based on stereotypes and statistics. These biases feed
into the representativeness heuristic. An image is painted of the type of
person who suits a particular role, even if intuitively these images do not
make any sense. We are faced with these biases throughout our lives, and
many of you will experience them as you work towards your big-thinking
goal.
So is there anything you can do about it?
Of course there is!!!!!

INSIGHT 1: HALTING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS, THE

REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC AND STATISTICAL
DISCRIMINATION
We have just discussed unconscious bias, the representativeness heuristic
and statistical discrimination. These three concepts can be separated
theoretically. However, when you are faced with one of them, it can be hard
to pinpoint the origin of what is happening. You will simply recognize that
you are being judged on an attribute that does not relate to your ability,
skills or talent. The concepts are not mutually exclusive, and it may even be
said that statistical discrimination and the representativeness heuristic are
two underlying causes of unconscious bias.
The good news? While you might not be able to distinguish between
these concepts easily, the things you can do to circumvent all three are quite
similar.
First, never let the images driven by stereotypes and heuristics sway you
when you think big. As someone who does not ‘look’ like the typical
person who fulfils a certain role because of your socioeconomic status,
ethnicity, gender or some other characteristic, there may be a steeper road in
your journey; however, it is essential to remember that you can add so much
value when you succeed. Why? Very often the jobs we do directly or
indirectly involve serving other people in society. In terms of their needs,
those people are arguably better understood by others who are like them.
Can people with a high socioeconomic status really know how to distribute
public services in a way that best serves people all across the income
distribution? Can men really know how to write, direct and produce
entertainment that is embraced equally by both genders? Can executives at
retail and services companies really understand global tastes and
preferences if they all come from the same geographic location?
If there is an image in society for what a person who does a particular
role should look like, remind yourself it is a good thing not to fit the mould.
Not doing so gives you a vantage point that others in that role do not have.
It gives you a competitive edge. Diversity makes good business sense – it’s
not just a warm and fluffy word.

If you are different from the people who have traditionally

pursued your goal, keep in mind that it is a good thing!

Who better to rock the boat than you? Make it your mantra, embrace the
lessons from Chapter 3 – remembering that self-belief is malleable – and
keep moving forward.
But how can you deal with those who interview you, those you need to
fund your business idea or those you rely on as advocates holding these
same images of what the usual mould looks like – and, worse, acting on
them?
The easy (but utterly depressing) answer? You have to be better than
everyone else.
Evidence from behavioural science does suggest that those who do not fit
the mould can make it, but they need to be better than those who do fit the
mould by a decent amount. It is pretty awful to be advised simply to be
more than twice as good to get the same opportunities. In fact, it is grossly
unfair. There must be an easier way! But while we wait for the world to
change, is there anything else that you can do to tip the odds back in your
favour?
Yes. There are lots of things you can do. Chief among them: research.
You should research the signals that are associated with the job or skills
ME+ will do or is looking to acquire. What does this mean? You know you
will be great in the job, but the people you want to hire, fund or take you on
as a consultant or freelancer do not have the same information as you. You
can get this information to them by acquiring signals related to the job you
want to do.
In the same way that stereotypes and the representativeness heuristic
cause people to associate certain types of people with specific roles, there
are also certain signals that will identify you as being a good match for that
role. These signals include attending certain conferences, and networking in
certain circles. These are all things you can do in the short term. Research
the signals for your big-thinking goal and any associated major milestones.
If you do not find the information easily, ask your new networks (see
Chapter 2). Then set about acquiring as many of these signals as possible.
 Along with these signals, make your skills, abilities and talents crystal
clear to the world. Make them salient. As previously mentioned, you can do
this by having an elevator pitch that is short and sweet, which tells people
what you bring to the table. You can also do this in a brief biography at the
top of your CV, LinkedIn profile, or somewhere prominent on the
application form or tender you may be filling out.

Remember, reactions to stereotypes are mostly unconscious,

so investing in signals helps people to recognize you quicker
as an expert in your field.

INSIGHT 2: EVERYONE’S ADVICE IS NOT CREATED EQUALLY

I met Amita at an event at a financial services firm, where I was speaking
about behavioural biases in feedback. Amita had just gone through a
development review. Various versions of the development review are
carried out in workplaces all over the world. Many of you will have
experienced one.
The idea behind a development review is positive. Employees get a
chance to reflect on what has gone well – and not so well – within regular
time intervals (often a year). Unfortunately, the quality of development
reviews varies depending on who is doing it. Amita’s had been a very
negative experience, which she told me about over a glass of red wine and a
plate of creamy blue cheese.
Amita had been told to work on her accent, under the guise of helping her
with presentation skills. She was rightfully upset, as her accent was an
inherent part of who she was. What’s more, Amita already spoke with such
clarity that I could not see why someone would think that ‘working on her
accent’ would help her get her messages heard better. Being told to work on
your accent is different from being told to slow down so people have a
chance to digest your messages, or being advised to project your voice so
that people can hear what you have to say.
I identified with Amita as I had been given similar ‘advice’ by a
professor a few years before. (If you have yet to hear me speak, I have an
Irish accent.) What was interesting was that this professor seemed to be
coming from a good place. I didn’t sense any malice or ill will beneath their
motivations. There was no spite. They genuinely thought that it would help
me be more relatable when speaking about my research in public forums. In
this case, their notion of ‘relatable’ seemed to be based on norms of who we
more commonly encounter on TV and radio.6 Like Amita, I was rightfully
annoyed. My accent, like Amita’s is to her, is an authentic part of who I am.
While I am happy for it to continue being shaped by where I live, I am
never going to cultivate a different persona to fit in with a social norm. And
neither should Amita.
Other advice that I have got throughout my career and have discarded
includes ‘take yourself more seriously’ and ‘be less direct’. My tendency to
deliver messages with no frills and my ability to laugh at myself are part of
who I am. If I am to succeed, it will be with these character traits in place. I
have many traits that I am happy to work hard to change – as I’ve talked
about in this book, I am in an ongoing battle with my impatience and need
for immediate gratification. I have worked hard over the years to boost my
resilience, and I continue to work hard every day on enhancing my ability
to explain difficult behavioural science material in an understandable way.
It isn’t useful for me to be told ‘change your accent’ because it’s impossible
– and even if it wasn’t, I’m not going to do it anyway.
When receiving feedback, the first question to ask yourself is what
aspects of yourself you will accept feedback on. Having a keen awareness
of the characteristics that you will not compromise on will help you to
avoid falling into the trap of pursuing activities that encroach on your
authenticity. From time to time, you will get advice that is flawed. It will be
based on constructed social norms from people with biases and blind spots.
Knowing your boundaries allows you to stay true to yourself.
While I have had numerous enquiries about my ability to facilitate a
course that would make employees more confident, I have never once been
asked to facilitate a course that would allow introverts to participate in
meetings in a manner they feel comfortable with. I have also never been
asked to facilitate a course for extroverts that would make them more
conscious about taking all of the air time in important conversations. Why
is that?
Society accepts that competitive extroverts are allowed to talk up in
meetings. They become the model. But what if being an introvert is an
inherent part of who you are? Do you really want to change a core part of
yourself to fit in with others? That sounds like a miserable existence.
Before you open the door to feedback, reflect on the aspects of yourself
that make you you. This will help you filter criticism, and pursue only the
pieces of advice that move you forward in a way that is in the direction you
want to travel. Never trade authenticity for approval.
So you are in the room. You are about to receive feedback. What should
you know?
I have one major rule on feedback:

If someone offers you feedback, you should listen simply

because they are spending their most valuable resource –
their time – to give it to you.

There is one big proviso. If you receive negative feedback and cannot see
yourself in it (this can happen: everyone has an ego), get a second opinion.
Ideally, get three. Why three? Because you need to figure out if it is your
biases that are stopping you hearing legitimate feedback, or if the
behavioural biases and blind spots of others are affecting what is being said.
The three people should be as independent as possible from each other. That
is, they should not know each other, or at least not converse regularly.
What then? If there is agreement among your three chosen people, view
it as a trend and take it seriously. As I’ve said before, if you are dead, you
really should lie down. It is time to address the issue(s) that they raise.
But what if the feedback of one person isn’t echoed by the other two?
Discard it. You have experienced feedback that is tainted by behavioural
biases and blind spots. If it is from somebody you can learn a lot from, it is
fine to go back – but with a poop filter. The second time around you should
not approach them. If the nay-sayer actually knocks on your door touting
pearls of wisdom, ask them for facts to back up their words. Third time?
Don’t answer the door.
Whose opinion should you care about? Those who are willing to take the
time to give feedback that will improve something that is important to your
big-thinking plan. This might include a product you are launching, skills
you are honing or a network you are building. Over time, you will figure
out who they are, particularly if you adopt the three-person rule mentioned
above. The people who you listen to regularly should be authentic in their
motivations to move you forward.

Overall feedback is not a democracy. That means that all

votes do not count equally. You will figure out whose feedback
 matters more over time.

When searching for feedback that will help you advance your strengths
and reduce your difficulties, you are putting your head above the parapet.
By doing so, you may attract the attention of people who take joy in cutting
you down to size. You are experiencing tall poppy syndrome – the tendency
for people to knock down others who are achieving great things. Of course,
what is thought of as ‘great’ is subjective, and simply moving from a status
quo is enough for you to be viewed as a tall poppy in some circles.
Tall poppy syndrome has been found to affect a variety of groups, such as
owners of start-ups, established business-owners, and high-achieving
women and managers.7 It is therefore important that you always filter the
feedback you receive, and stick to the three-person rule of thumb.

INSIGHT 3: AVOID BEING LABELLED INCORRECTLY

Jim was turned down for promotion two years ago and got a bit bummed
out about the situation. I met him for coffee at a time when he had begun to
decompress and had received feedback from people he trusted. The primary
reason Jim failed in his promotion application was that he was seen as
unreliable by one of the key senior executives in his organization. Jim
realized that the only time he’d worked with this senior executive had
coincided with a train strike on his commuter line. Jim could never tell how
long he’d have to wait for his train to show up to start his long commute
from the outskirts of London to the city centre.
Unfortunately, Jim being late to meetings due to the train strikes had been
mistaken for a lack of punctuality and dedication. Nobody saw Jim standing
in the cold waiting for a train that never came on the dark winter mornings.
All they’d taken notice of was Jim walking in late some mornings, and the
reasoning he gave had fallen on the deaf ears of the time-poor people in the
room.
Have you ever had an occasion where the narratives surrounding you
seemed a bit out of tune with the person you are? Have you ever thought, ‘I
don’t know where you got an idea like that from?’ You may have well been
a victim of fundamental attribution error. You can – and should – nip this
in the bud.
Fundamental attribution error causes us to attribute a person’s behaviour
to their identity rather than the situation. For example, Jim’s bad luck
(situation) was attributed to a lack of punctuality and dedication (behaviour
he can control).
Perhaps you ran over a deadline one time because it fell over a period of
ill health? For those relying on you, it can be easier to assume that you are
careless rather than blame the situation. In the same way, getting off on the
wrong foot with someone once may ruin the potential for a working
relationship that has great synergy. Wrong feet happen innocently every day
when someone interrupts us in a meeting, doesn’t respond to an email or
excludes us from a brainstorming session. Fundamental attribution error
causes an immediate reaction of damnation to hell, rather than a more
considered response that takes seriously the possibility that this person may
be having a rotten day and just temporarily dropped the ball.

Fundamental attribution error is more likely to happen when

we don’t know a person that well, or don’t care to know them
because we’ve failed to gel in the past.

At that point, confirmation bias steps in, ensuring that we search for and
recall additional information in a way that confirms a particular belief we
hold. In Jim’s case, this would mean that the senior executive’s ears pricked
up when other colleagues talked negatively about Jim. Conversely, the
senior executive’s ears would have closed when more positive anecdotes
about Jim were being relayed.
 Rigorous research shows that fundamental attribution error
corrupts high-stakes decision-making. Let’s say you are
starting your own company and have a view to scale beyond
the monies you personally have – you are probably
researching access to venture capital. Beyond money,
venture capitalists often provide expertise and capabilities
that give a competitive advantage to the start-ups they back.
They also provide a signal to other investors that those they
back are high-quality and worth watching. This signal can
potentially cause a virtuous cycle that ensures a backed start-
up gets an unprecedented crack of the whip at success.8 A
question then arises as to how good venture capitalists are at
picking start-ups to back in these high-stake decisions. After
all, they could make or break a company!
A 2004 paper by Joel Baum and Brian Silverman highlights
that while venture capitalists are pretty good at picking certain
winning traits, fundamental attribution error is alive and well.
Specifically, it causes them to overestimate the human capital
in the start-ups they back. Basically, if the companies they are
vetting have experienced good luck, it is attributed to the
people involved in the company rather than being in the right
place at the right time.

What does the fundamental attribution error mean for your big-thinking
journey? It implies that if you get lucky, that luck is going to be attributed
to you – with the knock-on effect that your journey is accelerated. On the
flip side, this means that if you hit a bit of bad luck, the negative outcome
could be attributed to you rather than the random event that caused it. For
example, let’s imagine you are making a product and a company in your
supply chain is exposed for paying its workers below the minimum wage.
You have done due diligence that you can easily demonstrate. However,
your customers and investors will associate these types of practices with
your company. This bad luck damages your reputation and loses you money
when they stop backing you.
It should also be noted that fundamental attribution error cuts both ways
– and who knows? Maybe good luck will come your way and you will get
to ride the wave of a positive image shock because of it …

TOP TIP: CIRCUMVENTING FUNDAMENTAL

ATTRIBUTION ERROR
This isn’t easy, and relies on your communication skills.
When you have bad luck, communicate how your outcome
on this particular occasion was down to randomness rather
than your skills and capabilities. If you are good at storytelling,
you can wrap it up in an amusing anecdote. If not, stick to the
facts and make clear you respect the other person’s time.
Lightning doesn’t normally strike twice, so reassure your
stakeholders that you are optimistic for a better outcome next
time.

INSIGHT 4: CASCADES
I recently attended an event to hear senior people in finance talk about how
to ensure inclusion of all talent in banking going forward. The panel
members were leaders from a variety of industries, and all of them spoke at
events like this pretty regularly.
I am particularly interested in inclusion and ensuring that people get
opportunities based on their skills and abilities alone. I was excited to be
there and meet some new people, many of whom could rock the boat in
their own organizations if they desired.
The conversation started off with a couple of people emphasizing how
well their firms were doing on inclusion (though you’re not going to change
the world if you already think it’s great). The third person to speak
emphasized confidence and an ability to network as what people really need
in order to be included. ‘Come to events like these,’ they said. ‘Take
responsibility for yourself. Spend time with us. We are here and want to
meet you.’ Now, I am all for people taking responsibility and determining
their own future. But responsibility is a two-way street. We cannot put our
heads in the sand and assume the playing field is level. If you are in a
position to level the playing field, you have a duty to do so.
You may shrug and think, ‘It was one opinion. What was said next …?’
Actually, not a lot else was said, thanks to the informational cascade this
speaker caused. An informational cascade occurs when we follow the lead
of the person who speaks before us, and don’t reveal our unique thoughts
that could add real value. Why do we do this? When we discuss information
that is familiar and feels right to the group we are in, we are liked by those
around us as we are all on common ground. Challenging thoughts cause
discomfort.
The person who spoke third was clearly looked up to by others on the
panel, and as such they had started a reputational informational cascade. I
had come along that night to get some fresh insights. But I was
disappointed. The overall discussion did not reflect the knowledge in the
room.
There are two main situations in which informational cascades may
hinder your progress. The first is when you are presenting to a group of
people, who will then deliberate on whether you got to some desired
outcome or on how well you performed. You may experience this if, for
example, you are pitching a project idea to a client, showcasing your
business idea to potential funders, presenting a new way of doing things to
senior management or defending a piece of work that you are being
assessed on. If one person says something negative, the others might follow
with other negative things.
The second is when you have a voice in a discussion that is important to
you. Your performance in this meeting may be relevant for your big-
thinking journey if you need to show leadership potential, creativity or
innovation. If you are part of a start-up with two or more other owners,
group meetings often decide what your product looks like. Essentially, as
I’m sure you are aware, important stuff is regularly decided by group
deliberations. Are you certain your voice is being heard equally with
everybody else’s, or is one person or one viewpoint dominating the
conversation?
There are two important things to remember. First, important decisions
that affect your progress are going to happen in meetings that you are part
of. Second, the decision-making process in these meetings is going to be
plagued by biases.
Are you surprised? Did you assume that group decision-making would
lead to better outcomes than decisions made by individuals? Two heads are
better than one, right? If one person has a blind spot, it’s likely that the
other person doesn’t and so cancels it out. You expect, then, that the
outcome from a group would be greater than the sum of its parts.
 But for this to hold true, everyone needs to participate freely and have
their voice heard. Everyone needs to be motivated by goals that are
collective rather than individualistic. Empirical evidence from the lab and
field suggests that this is not always the case.9 In fact, most of the time
meetings are affected by groupthink.
One of the first major problems of groupthink is that it causes people to
focus on shared information – as I experienced at that panel event – just so
they can feel good about themselves. In the next meeting you are in, sit
back and wait for the cascade.
When we are in a group setting, it makes us feel good about ourselves to
talk about things that are familiar to everyone at the table. There is no
discomfort. No uncomfortable pauses. Everyone is on the same page.
What does this imply for decision-making? You can have the most
diverse and intellectual team in the world, but if they don’t reveal
information that is unique to them as individuals, the quality of group
discussions will be poor. Spending too much time in group discussions
reiterating what is already known is clearly a waste of time. Focusing on
well-known information may make us feel good about ourselves, but that is
where the benefits end.
The second major problem is that many of the cognitive biases that affect
our daily decisions are actually exaggerated when groups meet. We have
already met a myriad of these biases, which include the planning fallacy,
representativeness heuristic, sunk cost fallacy and framing. Along with
exaggerating these individual biases, groupthink causes an over-focus on
information that members of the group have in common.
How can you fix groupthink when you are not leading the meeting? If
you are a participant (rather than helplessly there to hear the panel’s
feedback) you won’t gain many supporters by blurting out an opinion that is
very different from the group’s halfway through a cascade. So what can you
do? It may help to start with reiterating some shared information, so you
stick with the group’s unconscious etiquette of saying the same point over
and over again. No need to entirely spoil the party. Re-emphasize a point
that has been made already that you genuinely liked.
Next, state your unique opinion in as few sentences as possible, tacked
on to the end of your reiteration. You will also help your case if what you
say is based on facts and evidence rather than personal musings. If there is
hard evidence that signposts your idea is the right one, the group needs to
hear it. Too many people rely on personal anecdotes and gut feelings when
responding in meetings, and these people are hard to take seriously. If you
really care about an issue, do the preliminary work and change minds with
hard facts and data.
Assuming you know ahead of time the people who will be at the meeting,
also make an effort to appeal to ego by personalizing your pitch to the tastes
and preferences of the people in the room. If you are proposing something
entirely radical that departs from shared information and viewpoints, this
gives you the best chance of cutting though the groupthink.
Once you have had your say, rather than allow the cascade to flow at the
chair’s will, nudge somebody specific to speak next. You can do this by
saying something like, ‘The second point I made could benefit from
opinions from my colleagues in the room, such as [insert name here],
because …’ One great tip for meeting leaders to break a cascade in their
meeting is to call colleagues in random order (rather than allowing people
to speak by raising their hand). If you aren’t leading the meeting and don’t
have the luxury of choosing the order of speakers, you can still nudge who
gets to speak after you. By relaying that you want to keep the conversation
centred around your unique insights, you make the points you raised more
salient. You also increase the likelihood that any subsequent cascade will be
focused on information relevant to the topic discussed.
You could also go one step further. Let people know that because time is
sensitive, after the meeting you would like to receive written feedback from
the entire group. This serves two purposes. First, it allows for introverts and
others who are not usually heard in meetings to become a real part of your
discussion, giving you more diversity in the feedback that you receive.
Second, if agreed by the chair, a decision won’t be made until the next
meeting. Putting some time between raising a new idea which is counter to
the cascade and when the option to ‘go with’ is chosen will take the
emotion out of the decision and give your idea the biggest chance of
success.
If you are in a meeting where you are being judged ‘live’ and have an
opportunity to give feedback, your power to change a cascade is more
limited but the strategy is the same. If the cascade is positive, just let it
flow. After all, you are there to have a good outcome. If the panel need to
engage in shared-information back-scratching to get you there, so be it. We
all get our jollies somewhere. Chalk it up to luck, and thank the stars.
 If the cascade is negative, raise a new point in your reply, and nudge a
particular panel member to speak next by calling them by their name and
asking for their reaction to what you have said. Remember: put emphasis on
facts and hard data where possible.
But what about the occasions when we are to be judged by a panel and do
not have a voice in the ultimate decision-making process?

INSIGHT 5: JUDGEMENTS
I met Henry at a large conference designed to bring lawyers who support
financial services together. I was giving an overview of how behavioural
science insights can help teams work better. During the live Q&A, Henry
threw me a curveball and asked about pitching. He specifically wanted to
know the best position in the order to request when pitching for new
business with his own team. This was not a question related to my
presentation, but I recommended he go last if offered the choice. Provided,
that is, the last position was not just before lunch.
Henry wrote to me about eight weeks later and said he had tried this and
it had worked. He had secured new business. I was quick to respond that a
one-time success is not a winning streak and he should audit other
outcomes going forward. However, Henry had got me interested in thinking
about what determines whether someone is successful when they pitch,
interview, or perform ‘live’ and face a panel of judges. Turns out this is a
pretty interesting area of research in behavioural science.
We are constantly being judged in many areas of our life … When we
interview for a job. When we submit a piece of writing. When we give a
public talk. When we pitch our best idea. When we debate, audition, speak
up in a meeting, or even when we meet up for coffee with a colleague. In all
these situations we are being watched, and someone else determines if we
are successful. Someone else determines if we are to be taken seriously.
Even if we come fully prepared, the process of judging is riddled with
behavioural biases and blind spots. But can we tip the odds in our favour?
Planning on delivering a competitive pitch for funding? The time or place
in the order in which you get to present to your funding panel has been
shown to make a real difference to the outcome. If each person presenting is
rated with a score, you may be better off presenting as late as possible in the
day.10
 If it’s a situation where rating scores are not being calculated officially,
like in an interview setting, there are two effects to keep in mind if given a
choice of slots. The first is recency effect. Some research suggests you are
better off going as late as possible, as this way you remain fresh in the
judge’s memory. However, pulling in the opposite direction is primacy
effect – the person who is seen first is judged most accurately.
If you know you have a stellar idea, you should always present first. But
you should choose to go last if you don’t have 100 per cent confidence in
your idea, and if you know that the judges will cross-compare at the end of
the day. This harnesses the well-known peak-end rule that the most
emotionally intense points and the end of an experience are most
memorable. You are more likely to be successful if the judges recall what
you actually said, and going at the end ensures that happens!
The slots you definitely want to avoid? Try not to get stuck in the middle
unless you are certain your pitch will be the peak of the judges’ day.11
 TOP TIP: THE PEAK-END RULE AND PITCHING
In Chapter 3 we discussed the role of the affect heuristic (our
emotions) in our decision-making. The upshot: our emotions
weigh heavily in our decision-making. This also means that
emotions influence how a panel, audience or judge perceive
you. So what does this mean for your pitch?

1 Take care to avoid time slots where the judges are more
likely to be grumpy, like just before lunch or when there
won’t have been a break for a while.
2 Remember the influence of emotions when you are
preparing your pitch. Peak-end rule implies that pitchers
who emotionally connect to the judges are more
memorable. Connecting your pitch to a bigger meaning via
a simple narrative will give the judges the best chance of
connecting emotionally to you and your ideas. If you are
pitching for investment or a consultancy gig, use stories to
bring to life the added value that your product or service will
bring to the world. If you are pitching for a job, use stories
to help the panel fully understand your relevant work
experience. If you are pitching for a stretch project at work,
use stories to explain what taking responsibility for this
project will mean for you professionally.

INSIGHT 6: ARE YOU IN THE IN-GROUP?

I met Rob when I was doing a series of round tables on behavioural science
and culture. Rob evenly shared the responsibility of childcare with his wife,
and he had embraced agile working with gusto. He did this to the extent that
he never went to lunches or coffees with his colleagues, and on the days he
was in the office he worked through breaks and munched homemade
sandwiches. I learned this from Rob himself, who on the third day of my
round tables had made a special effort to come and meet me and the others
for lunch. Rob made a big deal of underscoring what an unusual event it
was for him to venture out for lunch, and how special I should feel. Rob
also reckoned he was an innate behavioural scientist and took an
extraordinary interest in my work, asking me an array of questions and
listening earnestly to my responses. He even asked me to go to the early-
bird dinner he organized monthly.
What became clearer during the extra-fun dinner I attended was that Rob
was incredibly well liked by his colleagues. This happened despite him
being largely absent from his workmates’ routine activities. It wasn’t just
social events; a handful of his colleagues relayed that Rob always helped
them with their work when called upon. This practice was also reciprocated.
Rob was weakly tied to the in-group and pretty much everyone else he
needed to collaborate with at work, but he still garnered the rewards of
respect and collegiality you might usually expect to be reserved for those
with much stronger links.
For those of us navigating a job with co-workers around us daily, you
will notice that some colleagues appear closer than others. If you are doing
a university degree, you will notice groups of classmates eating together or
going to coffee more often. If you are renting temporary office space or hot-
desking in a serviced office space, you will notice that some fellow renters
have gelled more than others. If you are networking, you will notice that
some circles tend to move together on rotation much more regularly than
others. If you are at the helm of a start-up, some of those on the journey
with you will get on better than others.

As humans we tend to form in-groups, with those in the group

being more likely to be part of social events, sporadic
gatherings and conversations.

Does it matter?
On the surface, no. While some people suffer from the fear of missing
out, I personally suffer from the fear of being included too often. I am
probably not alone. A lot of people like their own company and dread
weeks when their social calendar is back-to-back, especially if it is work-
related. I have no problem with people arranging a variety of activities and
not including me. I wish they would do it more often. However, with all of
the cognitive biases floating around, could close in-group dynamics cause
you to be excluded from opportunities that matter in your big-thinking
journey?
The simple answer is ‘yes’.
 A myriad of biases ensure that in-group members look after their own.
This includes informing them of opportunities when they arise. The
familiarity effect ensures that individuals that are in the in-group are
favoured. The halo effect also comes into play here – if someone has the
positive attribute of being a friend or confidant, other positive attributes like
skill, ability and talent are more likely to be associated with them.
Intergroup bias also causes members to evaluate those in their own group
more favourably. In periods of uncertainty, people who are in the in-group
are more likely to stick together, with the potential to leave others out in the
cold when times get tough.
I have no time for toxic in-groups that exclude people from meetings and
conversations that they should be part of. This is a clique. If you feel that
you are being excluded by a clique, it is important you call it out. You will
probably be met by a defensive reaction, but exclusion is exclusion
however it is dressed up.
Toxic in-groups are distinct from collegial in-groups. As humans, we
need to connect with each other. Collegial in-groups form when groups of
individuals in close proximity spend time together and hone relationships
that contribute to a common good. At a university, in your serviced office
space, at networking events or at your regular day job, you should make
time to be part of these groups.
Why? First, it is good for you to expose yourself to others and their ideas.
It helps you grow. Second, having a good social network enhances your
well-being.
It also doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There is ample evidence that
being a weak tie – that is, being an acquaintance rather than a close friend
(i.e. a strong tie) – is beneficial in terms of advancing career goals and
access to opportunities.12 Throughout your big-thinking journey, make an
effort to connect to collegial in-groups either as a weak or a strong tie.

Your progression means being nice to people, so get on with

it!

INSIGHT 7: GETTING SMALL YESES

Kaitlin was struggling at work. She had not received a bonus or a
promotion for last year’s efforts. What was worse was that when Kaitlin
asked her manager and the colleagues she worked with regularly for help in
getting more experience, or to be included in stretch assignments, she was
routinely told no.
Kaitlin saw the writing on the wall, and put herself on the job market.
When I met her, she was enquiring about doing an executive master’s at the
LSE. She was at the end of her tether and wanted some way for people to
see her differently. In this respect, a degree can indeed signal that you are
on an upward trajectory, but doing this alongside a job where she didn’t feel
valued made it unlikely that Kaitlin would thrive in a master’s programme.
Usually a meeting like this one is spent outlining the overall programme
structure, and the courses that Kaitlin would get to study. But it was clear
this wasn’t the right road for Kaitlin. Instead, we spent the meeting thinking
through shadowing and secondment opportunities at her current firm that
would expose her to a different set of colleagues. Within six months, Kaitlin
was seconded into a more senior role.
Embedded within this suggestion was my realization that Kaitlin needed
to accumulate some small yeses at work to get her off her plateau. Her
current status quo was being told no to any asks. And an added benefit of a
secondment was that she could later benefit from the incumbent effect.
Once Kaitlin was in a job at a higher level, she was more likely to be seen
as suitable for an equally senior role.
This anecdote has a happy ending. Two years after I met Kaitlin, she was
promoted – and received a decent bonus to boot!
Kaitlin had broken her trend of being told no and begun a new trend of
being told yes. Getting the first yes was the key to breaking her plateau, as
small yeses are cumulative. Being able to illustrate your first, second and
third yes is proof that you have talent and ability, particularly if the
opportunities you have been given come from three different people.
Are there behavioural science lessons that can help you get new people
around you to say yes? There are – so let’s explore flattery!
Economists can be cruel. To clarify, I mean academic economists.
Known for tough environments that are less appealing to women than men
(which is also credited as a reason why so few women stay in the field),13
flattery is seldom found in the corridors of top economics departments. So it
was a pleasant surprise when I started having conversations in industry
because the compliments I received increased exponentially. I like to think
that some of them (hopefully most) are genuine, but it happens so
frequently and roughly half are quite generic, which makes me pause and
consider whether the Barnum effect is at work. This is the phenomenon
that occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply
specifically to them, despite the fact that the description is actually pretty
generic. In other words, it is meaningless flattery. Yes, there is evidence in
behavioural science that suggests meaningless flattery works!
You can use the Barnum effect to help build a rapport with others.
Why does it work? Simple. The Barnum effect appeals to ego. As
humans we like to feel good about ourselves, and ego ensures that we give
more time to people who enable that. This is the explanation given by Craig
Landry and colleagues in their 2006 study, which found that male
respondents give more to charity when approached by attractive females in
door-to-door fundraising. The authors also suggest that the additional
generosity was prompted by a need to sustain ego and a positive self-image.
So what does this mean for you? It means you should make requests
more pleasurable by helping people feel good about themselves. Ideally,
you will have something authentic to say to the person you are speaking to
that will enhance their self-image and make the discussion easier. A
genuine compliment can go a long way! But if your mind goes blank, a
generic compliment can be a viable substitute. Keep a few in your back
pocket! The Barnum effect ensures they will likely be well received. But be
warned, it’s a coin toss. If you meet someone well versed in the Barnum
effect, it may come across as saccharine or unprofessional. Genuine
compliments and interactions are always preferred!

TOP TIP: ASKING FOR AN OPPORTUNITY

1 Remember the lessons from Chapter 2 regarding asking for

help (see p. 51)? The same applies to opportunities! Frame
the request as a win-win, outlining the costs and benefits in
a factual manner.
2 Draw on lessons from the judgements section of this
chapter (see p. 199). Use narrative to connect people to the
mood you want to convey.

If you are trying to get a ‘yes’ vote for an idea, talk about it regularly and
often. Why? The exposure effect ensures that if people are exposed to
something, they are more likely to endorse it. It also demonstrates that there
is a method in talking to others about your ideas. A happy side effect is that
it opens the door for feedback that will help you refine your ideas.
You can also leverage commitment bias. If there is someone in a meeting
you need a yes from and you sense the mood is right, put them on the spot
for an answer. Commitment bias ensures that once someone has publicly
committed to endorsing you, it is difficult for them to retreat from that
support. Cognitive biases also ensure they will likely feel good about this
endorsement. Win-win!
So how does it work? Once people make their mind up, they don’t like
changing it and confirmation bias sets in. As new information comes along,
they discount information that proves them wrong and over-focus on
information that reaffirms their endorsement.
If this all sounds a bit Machiavellian for your taste, don’t worry. Mine
too. I am someone who is prone to reciprocity bias – sometimes to my
detriment, but often to the gain of yeses. Essentially, I begin by treating
others how I like to be treated, and over time I find that this tendency
results in a further tendency to gain acquaintances and confidants who are
happy to support my various plans, with me reciprocating when needed. A
different approach to the Barnum effect, and much easier for those of us
who can’t stomach office politics and BS (and I don’t mean behavioural
science)!

INSIGHT 8: WHAT TO DO WHEN FACED WITH A NO!

I met Peter just as his conference company was beginning to garner success
and he knew he was going to make it financially. We were meeting to
discuss the possibility of me speaking at one of his events, and that morning
Peter was a fireball of energy. He talked fast, and spent a lot of time
describing how he had ended up being successful, and how he still couldn’t
believe it. He also talked at speed about teaching his two young children to
strive for entrepreneurship. I asked what the main lessons he was imparting
to them were. He focused on two: first, that you need an idea that adds
value to the world; and second, you need to keep going despite being told
no. I couldn’t have agreed with him more.
Peter had spent many months trying to make appointments with people
who could ensure his business succeeded – essentially sponsors and
speakers. He had failed to get many meetings. He also got told no at a lot of
the meetings he did manage to arrange. But he kept going because he knew
that he had a business that added value. Eventually, Peter got a yes. When
the rain finally came, it poured.

As you navigate your big-thinking journey, at times you will be

held back by a vote of no confidence. If you are not being told
no, getting rejected or failing regularly, you are not challenging
yourself adequately on your journey. Buck up!

When you are told no, you may find evidence of glaring mistreatment
and be filled with certainty that the people blocking your path are plagued
by behavioural biases and blind spots. What should you do about this?
There are two main options at your disposal. First, speak with the people
who turned you down. Relay your disappointment with their decision and
ask them to take another look at the value your idea could bring. As we
discussed in Chapter 2, the bizarre thing about human behaviour is that,
when you ask for help, you are unlikely to be turned down twice by the
same person. What often stops us trying a second time is the saving face
effect. So consider putting your pride to one side and having a direct
conversation where you ask for the decision to be reversed.
Second, you should explore revising your idea, taking into account any
feedback you have received. After revising, try asking again. If that doesn’t
work, look for other doors that you can knock on that have different people
behind them. When faced with people with behavioural biases and blind
spots, remember that there are many more people in the world without the
hang-ups that you are experiencing. It is never the case that you have to be
reliant on one person or one group of people to move you forward. You may
need to do some work to figure out who the next people you contact are, but
don’t ever get stuck on having the same door slammed in your face.
Insanity, after all, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a
different result.
Think of your big-thinking journey as a game of snakes and ladders. A
‘no’ vote is like sliding down a snake. It’s a setback. But if you persevere,
you’ll find a ladder that helps you make up what you lost. Today and in the
future you will still encounter snakes, but they are declining in numbers.
There are many more ladders than there used to be, and once you succeed
the ladders will become more frequent if you remember to pay any help you
receive forward. You just need to turn up regularly and take your small
steps to discover the ladders available to you now, and keep going if you
end up slithering down a snake.

INSIGHT 9: PLEASE SHOW UP FOR OTHERS

I have given many talks to groups at firms. When I started out I was mostly
invited to speak on gender behaviour gaps. The interesting thing for me?
The majority of the audience were women. Actually, I would say that when
I first started giving these talks more than 95 per cent of the audience were
women.
Does it matter? Yes.
We should care about circumventing the biases other people experience.
These biases arise when we assign kudos to people based on characteristics
that do not correlate with their ability, skills and talent. As an individual, it
is not nice to be on the end of other people’s biases and blind spots. So
while you pay attention to your own journey, and circumventing the biases
of others which affect you, also pay attention to levelling the playing field
for colleagues and acquaintances who may be facing a similar battle in a
different theatre.
What can you do to help?
Across the world, firms, universities and public bodies have created
affinity groups based around gender, race, ethnicity, LQBTQ+ identities and
more. These groups are great forums to share common experiences and
highlight concerns, in addition to – when run well – providing a space with
high levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety implies an
environment where people are secure in the knowledge that when they
speak up there will be no punishment or humiliation.
But it is important that, when there are open events, others who do not
identify as being part of the group show up. Why? If we only show up for
the group we belong to, there will always be winners and losers, and
unequal systems that reward characteristics that are unrelated to ability,
skills and talent will continue to be rewarded. We should champion change
in areas that we do not gain from, too. If enough of us take the time to learn
about how other groups may be struggling, real change can happen.

Change happens when a critical mass of people are all doing

the same thing and a tipping point is reached.
 A tipping point is behavioural science speak for the moment when the
number of small changes becomes significant enough to cause a much
bigger shift. The important thing is that we listen to each other, and really
try to walk in the shoes of other people from time to time. Just as you will
be asking for help, mentorship and opportunities on your medium-term
journey and expecting some yeses, in return you should be giving some
yeses to folk that ask for your help along the way. I am certain that you will
learn something from the experience!

INSIGHT 10: KEEP IN TOUCH

It may feel a bit disheartening to learn how many external biases you may
have to battle on your big-thinking journey. Perhaps you already knew that
other people’s biases were holding you back, or perhaps this was all news to
you. Whichever it is, take a second to consider how much they are holding
you back versus how much you are holding yourself back. For me, I know
that my own versus others’ biases are 80:20. What do you think your ratio
is? This exercise should help you see that a decent amount of your journey
is within your own control.
In this chapter, I have addressed the major occasions where I expect you
will encounter biases and blind spots in others on your big-thinking journey.
I hope the insights are also transferable to occasions which are not
explicitly covered. But if they aren’t and you can’t find answers by seeking
help from your existing network, I would love to help you. At the back of
the book, I’ve noted how you can get in touch with me so I can continue to
help you move forward. What’s most important is that you are not waylaid
for too long on your journey to ME+.

HOW CAN YOU END OTHER PEOPLE’S BIASES AND BLIND

SPOTS?
Learning how to circumvent other people’s biases and blind spots can help
ensure a smoother road on the journey you have committed to take.
Remember Alex, the entrepreneur who was refusing to listen to feedback?
When I met her in 2018, she was turning a blind eye to her own
disorganization, which was holding her back. However, as I demonstrated,
Alex will also almost certainly face the biases of others. Given that far
fewer women than men are entrepreneurs, mechanically Alex does not look
like the average person in that role. She needs to pay attention so that a
falsely perceived lack of ‘fit’ does not also delay her progress.
The ten behavioural science insights provided in this chapter can help
Alex. They can also help you on occasions where you encounter the biases
of others. I encouraged you to read this chapter from start to finish. Each
insight related to a potential major occasion in your journey when you may
be confronted with the biases and blind spots of others. You can call upon
the insights as you need them, but I do hope you never do!
Let’s recap them now …
INSIGHT 1: HALTING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS, THE
REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC AND STATISTICAL
DISCRIMINATION
You can give certain signals that will identify you as being a
good match for a specific role. Research what the signals are
and acquire as many of them as possible.

INSIGHT 2: EVERYONE’S ADVICE IS NOT CREATED

EQUALLY
If feedback does not ring true, adopt the three-person rule
and see if they all say the same thing.

INSIGHT 3: AVOID BEING LABELLED INCORRECTLY

Fundamental attribution error causes bad luck to be
considered part of your persona by others. Hone your
communication skills and ensure key stakeholders are always
kept in the loop concerning any setbacks.

INSIGHT 4: CASCADES
An informational cascade happens when a group gets
together and focuses on what they already know. Pay
homage to the shared information before you outline a
different course. This will ensure that you’re heard. Put
particular emphasis on data that backs up your ideas.

INSIGHT 5: JUDGEMENTS
When your journey relies on being judged by strangers, it is
best to take the last slot of the day. Use narratives to connect
the benefits of your idea to the real world, ensuring that you
end your presentation well to leverage the peak-end effect.

INSIGHT 6: ARE YOU IN THE IN-GROUP?

Developing relationships throughout the course of your
journey is important. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Invest time in developing weak ties who you can learn from,
and benefit from reciprocity.
 INSIGHT 7: GETTING SMALL YESES
To make a yes more likely, appeal to the other person’s ego
with a genuine compliment. Talk about your ideas regularly,
as exposure makes them more likely to be adopted.

INSIGHT 8: WHAT TO DO WHEN FACED WITH A NO!

When faced with a no, remind yourself that there is learning in
failure. You can choose to ask for the decision to be reversed,
adopt the feedback you received, or find a new door to knock
on. The most important thing? Never give up.

INSIGHT 9: PLEASE SHOW UP FOR OTHERS

Pay attention to levelling the playing field for colleagues and
acquaintances. Change happens when a critical mass of
people are all doing the same thing and a tipping point is
reached. Every person who adopts this ethos therefore gets
us closer to a more positive status quo. Be one of those
people.

INSIGHT 10: KEEP IN TOUCH

If you find yourself dealing with a behavioural bias or blind
spot that is truly unrelated to what is covered in this chapter,
drop me an email and we can try to figure it out together.

Remember these ten insights throughout your big-thinking journey when

you run into other people’s biases and blind spots, or when preparing for
any major milestone that requires interactions with others. I know for sure
that if you commit to this strategy, you’ll be far more likely find yourself on
a smoother path!

Happy circumventing!
Before we move on, make sure that you:
Have read through the ten behavioural science insights.
Spend some time to anticipate any occasions when you think
you may need these insights. Set reminders in your diary so
you remember the relevant insight(s) when you’re approaching
the event.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER

1 Unconscious biases: Learned stereotypes that are

ingrained and which influence decision-making via System
1.

2 Tall poppy syndrome: The tendency for people to knock

down others who are achieving great things.

3 Fundamental attribution error: This causes us to attribute

a person’s behaviour to their identity rather than the
situation.

4 Informational cascade: A phenomenon in which

individuals make the same points in a meeting repeatedly.

5 Peak-end rule: Implies that people judge an experience

based on their feelings at the peak (most intense point) and
at the end.
 CHAP T E R 6

Environment

‘It’s been a hell of a day,’ I mumbled to myself, putting my key in the front
door. It was January 2020, and from the moment I put my feet on the
ground to salute the sun, to the last steps of my journey home, it had been
awful. In fact, I had spent the whole day shovelling poop, only for various
people to pick it up and start throwing it at each other again. I was
exhausted. I was glad to be home.
Each and every day, I am lucky. I get to decompress in an environment
where I know that I will be happy, healthy and safe. Whether it’s crashing
on the couch with my bulldog Kacey, soaking in a hot bath, or reading
novels in my love seat, there is something about getting to spend time alone
in my sanctuary that can ease the stresses of even my worst days. Waking
up each morning and reminding myself that I will get to relax at the end of
the day allows me to roll with the punches (or poop!) the day throws at me.

It is essential to find a space – and earmark some time – for

rest and relaxation.

This may be an entire house if you live alone, your bedroom if you
house-share, or just a nook somewhere at home if you have a gaggle of
toddlers to raise. The surroundings that we find ourselves in, whether
consciously or unconsciously, affect our behaviour in myriad ways,
including our performance, stress levels and happiness.
In behavioural science there is a well-worn adage that context matters.1
How we behave is affected by the cues we experience on a moment-by-
moment basis in our environment. We process these cues unconsciously.
For example, people buy more French wine when French music is playing
in a store, and more German wine when German music is playing.2 Why?
The music acts as a subconscious cue, nudging a person towards a
particular choice. But we are blissfully unaware of the cue.
External stimuli alter our mood and the decisions that we make without
us even knowing it, and stimuli are all around us, both strategically placed
(like the music in the shop in the example above) and totally accidental. At
the LSE, one of our student prizes even has the name ‘Context Matters’, to
remind students to think about the context in which they did their research
when interpreting their findings.
All of the preceding chapters have needed you to be on high alert. In
order to make the messages of these chapters work, it was necessary to take
continuous small steps. You were experimenting to see what behavioural
science insights would help you change your own behaviour, and trying to
circumvent the damaging effects of other people’s biases and blind spots.
But this chapter is different. It is about making decisions about the
environment in which you do your work.

The great thing about taking steps to change your

environment is that often you can make a structural change
once, and reap the benefits for years to come.

You don’t need to consciously take actions to choose aspects of your

environment every day.
The main aim of this chapter is to outline environmental tweaks that will
help you work better and faster. A tweak is a change to your environment
that you make once, as compared to small steps that you take repeatedly.
These tweaks are mostly easy to do and it is relatively easy to figure out if a
tweak gave benefits, as its effects should be felt almost immediately.
But there is one exception …
You will have to work hard to make your environment interruption-free.
This can be tedious at first, and battling online interruptions is the ultimate
challenge. You may find yourself repeatedly falling victim to the intent-
action gap, which describes the gap that so often emerges between the
actions people say they are going to take and what they actually do. To
reflect this, the ten behavioural science insights are split into two distinct
sections.
The first section represents the small steps that can be made to help you
avoid digital interruptions. Consistent with the space it takes on the page,
this change may take a while to embed in your life and requires repetitive
actions. We will tackle this first, following the advice of Brian Tracy, a
thought leader in individual personal development, who tells us to ‘eat that
frog’ – meaning it is always best to start the day with the hardest task on
any list.
The second section represents general tweaks to your environment that
should help you work better and faster. These are written as rapid-fire
insights for you to consider and should be relatively easy to try out. At the
end of this section you should commit to rolling out at least one of these
nine insights in your own life now. But, over time, you may wish to
incorporate more.
As you work through the two sections, remember that the lessons from
behavioural science relate to the average person in a particular population.
This means that not all of the suggestions will necessarily work for you.
Pay attention to whether the tactic(s) you do choose to adopt changes the
level of digital disruptions you experience in your work environment. If not,
try another tactic and evaluate the effects again. For the rapid-fire insights,
introduce each environmental tweak into your life in a trial-and-error
manner, and give it one week to start seeing benefits. This means that you
ultimately keep only what is successful and discard the rest. By the end, you
will have adopted a combination of insights that work best for you.
Are you ready to get the behavioural science designers in?

INSIGHT 1: INTERRUPTIONS
I struggle to ignore distractions. A ding on my smartphone to signal a social
media notification or text message jolts me out of flow. If I’m not paying
attention, I can find myself mindlessly surfing the internet. A knock on my
office door can cause me to return home with the same to-do list I started
my day with. My System 1 even decides to check my email on autopilot,
setting me up to be distracted by the random thoughts and requests of
colleagues and friends.
In 2018, after a particularly bad day of distractions, I decided to do an
audit. I counted and logged the number of distractions that I experienced
over seven one-hour slots that fell between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., my core
working hours for one day. The final tally was 5, 9, 4, 7, 5, 3, 11 – 44
distractions in one working day! That was the day I decided to do
something to stop distractions for good.
 Interruptions are a problem for all of us. In order to work out just how
much they are affecting you, I suggest you do your own workday audit.
Interruptions nobble the most precious resource you have: time. They are
the ultimate time-sinker. Thanks to an ability to be contacted in person, on
the phone, or via email, WhatsApp, Skype, Messenger, LinkedIn, Twitter,
Slack, Teams, Zoom and Meets, as well as an ever-increasing list of other
mediums that I am blissfully unaware of, we relinquish control of our time
to the whims of other people.

We unconsciously meander into environments that facilitate

an excessive number of interruptions.

The cost? Our flip-flopping attention makes it hard to get anything

groundbreaking done. Or, indeed, anything done at all.
In Chapter 2, we spoke about achieving a state of flow. Flow enables
focused work. When you are in flow, time flies. You are immersed. You do
your best work. For most of us, this type of immersion involves an activity
that flexes significant cognitive muscle. When I achieve flow, I access my
most creative and innovative ideas. I am more productive. I can even
achieve flow when I batch-respond to emails offline. This means that I go
offline, respond to all of my unanswered emails, and leave the room when I
turn my Wi-Fi back on. I don’t see any responses until I sit down for the
next batch. By batching, I am in tune with one task. I am out of tune with
the rest of the world … until I am interrupted.
Does it matter if we allow ourselves to get interrupted? Yes! Whether you
are designing a new product, coming up with a creative solution to a
problem, or learning a new skill, you need periods of time without
interruptions. Even the briefest of interruptions – like responding to a beep
on your phone – can derail flow and cause you to make mistakes when
trying to concentrate on something challenging.3 Interruptions don’t just
take up time in the moment. They also cause a need for more effort (and
time) to return to the same level of flow you experienced prior to the
interruption. Interruptions also negatively affect your well-being. They have
been linked to irritability, depression and lower levels of job satisfaction
across a variety of worker types and contexts.4 Everyone needs to have
some time in their day that is in an environment free of interruptions.
But how can this be achieved?
 It is up to you to purposefully design and seek out an environment that
serves you well.
One of the biggest interrupters is firmly within our grasp to curtail:
digital interruptions. We can turn off alerts and tune out the endless requests
for our time. Remember, time is the only resource you cannot replenish. As
such, you must set up environmental cues that allow you to protect your
time during periods that you wish to avoid being interrupted.
In Chapter 3, the importance of curbing time-sinkers was emphasized as
a way to carve out time for the activities that will move you forward
quickly. For most of us, the biggest time-sinker is the time we squander
online, engaged in a variety of useless activities.
How you set up your workspace can make you more or less likely to
succeed in your quest for periods of quiet concentration. At one end of the
spectrum, there are those of you whose personal area consists of a laptop.
Your workspace venue is TBC each day. It could be a local café, a park, the
kitchen table or even a long train journey. At the other end of the spectrum
are those who have a devoted home office or a designated workspace in an
office. Regardless, the first port of call is always to minimize online
distractions.

Any time we want to diminish a negative behaviour, we should

try to increase its costs and decrease its benefits.

It is up to you to increase the hassle of going online when you want to do

focused work. In Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day,
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky suggest turning all alerts off on your
smartphone, removing email from your desktop and turning the Wi-Fi off to
gain focus.
What are the mechanics in how this causes a change in behaviour? It
increases the cost of accessing online distractions, and also reduces the pain
(that is, you get a benefit gain) of having to grapple with your attention
being constantly drawn to an enticing message or refreshing your Twitter
feed.
Following their suggestions, I dutifully removed my email and social
media apps from my iPhone, along with all alerts. This included phone call
and message alerts, resulting in my phone never ringing (and I do mean
never!). On my desktop, I removed email. I also programmed my Wi-Fi to
forget the password that allows me easy access. This means that if I wanted
to go online, I had to go downstairs where I had the password written down
(my broadband provider handily insists that the password is weird,
convoluted and difficult to memorize). Essentially, I increased the cost of
accessing the distractions that affect me the most. I made my immediate
environment a low-interruption zone.
So did it work?
At first, I found new distractions as I suffered through withdrawal
symptoms. I made tea, I decluttered, I tickled a bulldog who clearly wanted
to sleep, and I damned Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky to an equally
miserable existence and boring environment.
But I persevered.
I will confess to persevering only because the hypocrisy of not
persevering weighed heavily on me (increasing the psychological cost of
quitting). As a commitment device I had told several people that I was
making this change. This was a case of the saving face effect working in a
positive direction.
One week later, the penny dropped. My productivity began to increase
exponentially. I was happier and much less stressed. A mantra that I am not
a heart surgeon or president of a small country reminded me that being
offline for sustained periods would not cause any real harm.
How did I manage with work emails? I am not totally irresponsible. I
retained an email app on an old iPad and answered diligently from there
once a day. I did this at 6 p.m. every evening. I chose this time strategically,
as I knew I was less likely to get distracted by ping-pong responses. If an
email required me to do some work to respond, I scheduled it in a queue for
some time over the next week, depending on how important I perceived it
to be. If I was able to respond to the email quickly, I did so immediately.
Not checking emails on a moment-by-moment basis required real self-
discipline because I am a self-confessed addict when it comes to
continuously refreshing my inbox. It is something I do unconsciously. You
may have a similar online addiction that you need to crack. It may not be a
communication tool – it could be gaming, shopping or checking the news.
So what can you do?
Only allow access to your time-sinker from one device. And place that
device out of your immediate environment when you need an interruption-
free zone. Voila! You have mechanically engineered an interruption-free
environment. And what happens next? Your System 1 (your fast brain) will
begin to associate that device with the time-sinking activity, making it a
new habit to engage in this way and reducing the likelihood that you
unconsciously engage in your time-sinker via some other mechanism. This
is what I did when I only allowed myself to check emails on my iPad. I also
only engaged with social media and messaging on this iPad. I essentially
decided to become a person who only engages in online communication
once a day, via this iPad.
In the beginning this was very conscious and deliberate. I struggled to not
check my emails on my phone or laptop, as I had done routinely for years.
On some days, I allowed myself to break, but as a compromise I made sure
to fetch my iPad and checked from there. Although in general I was
checking more regularly than I’d have liked, I was still solidifying the fact
that this was an activity that was associated with the iPad. At some point,
my new habit crossed some invisible behavioural science threshold, and
being a once-a-day email checker became a part of my identity.
I am always fascinated by how one small change can bring about
unexpected consequences or an externality. The majority of people who
cluttered my inbox were fine with a slower turnaround. They even got the
hint and emailed me less. A minority, not so much. These people took to
reaching me in various ways, stopping short only of sending a carrier
pigeon. One colleague even insisted that I could open a separate email
account to receive emails from priority people. How did I respond to this?
At 6 p.m. I wrote a reply letting them know it was super sweet that I was
missed, but a separate account would likely be a backward slide in terms of
my email addiction and I wasn’t prepared to risk it. I thanked them for
being understanding as always, and promised to call at 6 p.m. the following
day from my iPad. Labelling them as ‘sweet’ and ‘understanding’ in this
case was a Barnum effect appeal to ego, but thankfully it worked. Freedom!
Okay. I appreciate that some of you will engage in work where it is not
possible to allow a twenty-four-hour turnaround on all responses. You may
need to react three, four or five times a day. In this case, a priority email
account may actually be useful for you. Or you might want to find another
very specific way that people relevant to your productive and necessary
work can contact you urgently. However, if you truly believe that you need
to be sitting on email or some other form of online communication all day
long, please question your rationale. Aside from emergency switch
operators or folk working in a call centre, it is pretty hard to believe that
being constantly on call is the best use of your time.
Don’t believe me? Start stealing one hour away from online distractions
each day and monitor two things. First, did the world stop moving? Second,
did you get something worthwhile done in the time you stole away?
Whether you are sitting in an open-plan office, working in a local café or
cocooned in a home office, it is important that you prioritize some time for
your small steps. Do this intentionally.

Make a commitment right now to engage with online

communications differently.

That commitment should move you from reacting to frivolous online

time-grabs that serve as time-sinkers, towards more intentional interactions
that provide benefits without distractions.

As a starting point to battling online distractions:

1) What is your biggest digital distractor? ________

2) Set up your digital environment so you only engage with this distractor
through one device. What device will you use? ________
3) Make a commitment to only engage with that device at particular times
of your day. What times will you agree to? ________

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHTS
In 2018, I kicked my digital distractions habit. Given my success, the
concept of making small changes to my environment that would have
disproportionate effects on my productivity continued to pique my interest.
I approached my exploration of additional environmental tweaks from a
cheap and cheerful DIY perspective.
I am willing to bet that interacting intentionally online, rather than
allowing sporadic distractions to grab your time, will do the heavy lifting in
terms of carving out hours to devote to your big-thinking journey. It will
also mean that networking is more pleasurable as you concentrate fully on
the person in front of you. As you come out of your online existence and
into the physical world, it is worth looking around you with a question in
mind: Does this physical space help or hinder my ability to think big, take
small steps and build the career I want?

The environment in which we live and breathe directly affects

our performance, motivation, perseverance, and the choices
we make at any given moment.

It is important that you choose to spend as much time as possible in an

environment that nurtures both you and your ambitions. This is good news
for the times we can readily modify our physical space and choose who we
work with.
Learnings from behavioural science provide ideas about what
environmental tweaks may help reinforce your small-steps habit.
Remember, behavioural science studies typically focus on average effects
that relate to one particular population. You may be different from both the
average and the population in question. However, with certainty, I can say
that your environment does change how you behave, your mood and your
ability to focus. So let’s explore nine rapid-fire behavioural science insights
so you can get on with seeing what works for you!

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 1: AIR

The ideal workplace has good airflow. Why? Good airflow has been
convincingly linked to better performance in the workplace, with poor
ventilation linked to absenteeism.5 If you work in an office, or simply do
not have the luxury of this choice, make an effort to work in a well-
ventilated area or at least go outside a few times during the working day. A
friend of mine swears by taking a notebook and pen and sitting outside on a
wall among all of the London concrete at lunchtime. This hour gives him
the space to take stock of his day so far. It also allows him to set intentions
for productive work in the afternoon. All of this while enjoying the hustle
and bustle of people-watching!
A wonderful new friend of mine told how, for as long as she can
remember, she always chooses cafés with outdoor space and beautiful
surroundings in which to enjoy a break over a cup of tea. She reasons that
her beverage may be double the price, but the value added to her well-being
far exceeds the hefty mark-up.
 Can’t find an hour to take a breath outdoors? Plan to take a work call in
an outdoor space, or arrange to have a meeting in an airy coffee shop. We
devote too much time to useless meetings these days anyway, so we may as
well do them in nicer surroundings. At the LSE my office is not well-
ventilated. My solution? I choose to hold meetings in a variety of places,
including public spaces. Where there’s a bench, there’s a way!

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 2: GREEN

If you really can’t get outside during your working day, take a trip to the
local garden centre and bring the outside indoors. Adding plants to your
work area has the potential to augment your attention and productivity
levels. A green companion is also beneficial in terms of reducing the ill
effects of staying indoors too long, such as stress and fatigue.6
Now all you have to do is keep the plants alive! If that’s beyond you, try
a cactus terrarium. Mine even came with ornamental meerkats.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 3: NATURAL LIGHT

Prioritizing spending time in spaces with good airflow has the added
advantage that you are more likely to experience natural light. Sitting on a
park bench and writing this chapter may seem like an odd choice for
someone who has the option of a private place to work, but the benefits I
receive from working in an environment with natural light even include
better cognitive performance.7 I certainly notice that my mood and focus
are more on point. I also experience less cabin fever and related fatigue,
which tend to strike when I work indoors all day.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 4: ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

Don’t have either the inclination or the option to sit outdoors? I live in the
UK, so 75 per cent of the year I would be blown away by a westerly wind if
I perched on a park bench. If you do have to expose yourself to artificial
light for long periods of time, there is evidence that you should choose
brighter options if you need to concentrate on a specific problem or task,
and dimmer lights if you need to get your creative juices flowing.8
Experiment and see if this works for you!

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 5: TEMPERATURE

Group meetings can be places where we collaborate and push boundaries;
we can come up with fantastic ideas or new ways of thinking. With the right
group of people who feel psychologically safe and share common
objectives, magic can really happen. Groupthink is nowhere to be found.
Still, always remember to take the temperature of the room … literally.
When people are hot and bothered, they have been shown to be less
productive and cooperative.9 It is the same when you are working on your
own.

Typically, people will find flow easier when the room

temperature is between 16 and 24 degrees Celsius.

The exact temperature that is the most conducive to productivity is

personal, so why not find out your own range! Buy a cheap and cheerful
thermometer and experiment with what temperature you feel most
comfortable working in.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 6: NOISE

Of course, sitting in a beautiful café or any public space brings the real risk
of unpredictable noise that can act as an interruption. Whether you are
distracted by the hustle and bustle around you or can tune it out depends on
the person. However, the evidence is clear that quieter surroundings
promote motivation10 and productivity.11

It is up to you to make the effort to work in an environment

that is quiet enough for you to focus when you need to.

Controlling the noise in your workspace is easy if you have an office of

your own. If you work in a noisy environment, noise-cancelling headphones
can help. For those of you who work in an open-plan environment, invest in
some kind of sign or signal that you place on your desk to indicate that you
should not be disturbed, like a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign or a miniature traffic
cone or a flag.
If you are working out and about, it is easy to find information online
about times when cafés are busy, allowing you to plan your concentrated
work around times that are quieter and when you can secure your favourite
table. In the same way that you make efforts to plan meetings with
colleagues or your new network, pay attention to the plans that you make
with yourself for productive time.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 7: A SPACE OF YOUR OWN

A lot of you will have a designated space – whether it’s a desk in an open-
plan space, a nook in your bedroom, or an entire office. This is the place
you go to in order to engage in continuous learning or other focused work.
If you do not have an obvious space, try to ring-fence an armchair in the
corner of a room or something similar. Remember that routine behaviours
build habits. In this case, repeatedly going to one particular space, where
you always work on the same thing, causes System 1 to automatically
associate that space with that activity.
Why does this matter? It allows you to settle into your tasks and achieve
flow more quickly. You can also use this designated space to carry out the
weekly planning for your big-thinking journey.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 8: CLUTTER-FREE

Once you have identified your space, it is worth keeping it clutter-free. This
helps you avoid being distracted.

A clear space = a clear mind.

If you take the time to visit me at the LSE and pop in unannounced, you
will notice that one of my difficulties in life is that I tend to be messy. But I
am much happier in less cluttered environments – and it is not just a matter
of happiness. I am also better able to concentrate and more productive when
my workspace is tidy. I can more easily put my hand on what I need. So I
wasn’t surprised to see emerging evidence that links clutter to higher levels
of distraction.12
Decluttering any devoted workspace that you have will make it easier to
achieve flow when you need to get in the zone. For those of you who, like
me, are naturally on the messier side of things, this will involve recycling
and selling some of your possessions. When doing this, be careful not to fall
into the endowment effect trap. This operates by causing an emotional
attachment to your possessions and describes the tendency for people to
overvalue things that they own. If you have ever sold your house, it
probably caused you to overvalue the painting and decorating that you did
when talking to the estate agent about the valuation. It is also what is
causing you to hold on to old books, clothes and knick-knacks that are no
longer of use and might find better homes elsewhere. But once you toss
something, you will adapt quickly to the loss. Remind yourself of this so
you toss more rather than less, and give yourself that clutter-free zone.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 9: COLOUR

In the process of decluttering your space, there is also an opportunity to
freshen up your walls. Research on colour suggests that the colour you put
on the walls of your personal workspace may help your performance.
However, there is no one colour that has been shown to reign supreme.
Along with personal tastes there is also evidence to suggest that the colour
you want to surround yourself with depends on what you are trying to
achieve. Blue walls enhance creativity and systematic thinking, as well as
cognitive performance.13 Red walls, on the other hand, have been shown as
advantageous when focusing on detail-oriented tasks.14 Red has also been
shown to be useful on occasions that call for guts, gumption and a
competitive spirit. In a 2005 study, Rowe and colleagues illustrated this in
an innovative way by exploring the fact that in the 2004 Olympic Games,
competitors were randomly assigned red or blue attire in the wrestling and
boxing competitions. The random assignment ensured that there were no
systematic differences between those that were wearing red as compared to
those in blue. (This could happen if those of higher skill or a more
competitive spirit more regularly chose to wear red.) What did they find?
Those wearing red are twice as likely to win as those wearing blue.15
It is not just the colour that has been investigated with respect to
performance, either. How vivid a colour is has also been shown to affect
outcomes. In private study spaces, vivid colours have been shown to
increase performance over pale colours.16
Overall, the literature on colour doesn’t offer definitive guidelines on
how we should decorate our personal spaces, and an evidence base on
colours outside red and blue is not yet established. But research does show
it might be worth putting red on one of your walls if you want to evoke a
competitive spirit, and opting for blue if what you want is to achieve
calmness or lower levels of anxiety.
 HOW WILL YOU DESIGN YOUR PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL
SPACE?
Tweaking your environment by drawing on insights from behavioural
science can stack the odds in your favour and help you realize your goal.
This chapter has been about identifying these tweaks. After discussing how
to minimize online disruptions at length, I ran through nine rapid-fire
insights to help you create an environment that will make you more focused
and productive, in which to take regular small steps and engage in activities
that allow you to realize your big-thinking goal.
Let’s recap these insights now …
INSIGHT 1: INTERRUPTIONS
Commit to allowing virtual disruptions from only one device,
which you place out of mind and sight when trying to achieve
flow.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 1: AIR

Seek out spaces with good airflow throughout your day to
improve your performance.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 2: GREEN

Add plants to your work area to augment attention capacity
and productivity.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 3: NATURAL LIGHT

Prioritize spending time in places with natural light to improve
cognitive performance. If you are not blessed with great
natural light options indoors, head outside.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 4: ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

When working in a room with artificial light, choose brighter
lights for concentration and dimmer lights for creativity.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 5: TEMPERATURE

Pay attention to how your solo work and creative meetings
play out at temperatures between 16 and 24 degrees Celsius,
and adjust accordingly.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 6: NOISE

Seek quieter surroundings to increase motivation and
productivity for concentrated work.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 7: A SPACE OF YOUR OWN

Secure a space of your own and program System 1 to
automatically associate that space with concentrated work.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 8: CLUTTER-FREE

 Keep your workspace clutter-free to improve concentration.
Watch out for the endowment effect, which can be the cause
of holding on to clutter unnecessarily.

RAPID-FIRE INSIGHT 9: COLOUR

Experiment by surrounding yourself (this could be clothing or
walls) with blue if you seek creativity, systematic thinking and
improved cognitive performance. Switch to red if you want to
focus on detailed-oriented tasks or to rally your competitive
spirit.

In 2018, I (mostly) kicked my digital distraction habit by paying attention to

my digital environment, and altered my physical environment to support
more productive working practices. These changes meant I found flow
much more regularly, which in and of itself brought joy.
Want to do the same? Commit to a tactic that will curb digital
disruptions, and simultaneously choose a rapid-fire insight to try out. Pay
attention, and mindfully acknowledge the benefits these changes bring.
These benefits can include working better, faster and with more flow. If you
see no sign of benefits after one week, modify the tactics you are using to
curb digital disruptions and try a different rapid-fire insight. With trial-and-
error learning, you are certain to find tactics that ensure you have periods
free from interruptions and digital distractions. Equally, as you work
through the rapid-fire insights, you will hopefully land on environmental
tweaks that work well with your persona.
Eventually you should have trialled all of these insights, and be in a new
steady state where the environmental tweaks that work for you are
integrated into your daily life. Further down the road, they will fade into the
background and simply be a structure that supports your big-thinking goal.
When I put my key in the door a few weeks after the poopy day that
made me decide to change things up, I knew I was entering a house with a
purposefully designed space that would give me the best chance of working
more later if I cared to do so. I didn’t work, though. Instead I turned off all
of my devices and became engrossed in Truth Be Told, Apple TV’s latest
drama with the fantastic Octavia Spencer.
I also leaned on some behavioural science insights for honing resilience.
These are the insights I will share with you next …
Happy designing!
Before we move on, make sure that you:
Make a specific commitment to reduce the amount of
interruptions you encounter daily.
Select one environmental tweak from the nine rapid-fire
behavioural science insights that you will roll out into your life
tomorrow.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

MENTIONED IN THIS CHAPTER:

1 Context matters: The fact that how we behave is affected

by the cues we experience on a moment-by-moment basis
in our environment.

2 Nudging: Provides positive reinforcement that influences

the behaviour of individuals.

3 Intent-action gap: The gap between what people say they

are going to do and what they actually do.

4 Externality: A cost or benefit that affects a third party (who

did not choose to incur that cost or benefit) because of
another person’s actions or change in behaviour.

5 Endowment effect: Causes an emotional attachment to

your possessions.
 CHAP T E R 7

Resilience

‘You okay?’ Kevin, a good friend of mine, asked in October 2004 as we

pulled out of my driveway in Cork.
I was still waving furiously to my dad, even when he was out of sight.
The tug on my heart was unmistakable, and it was consistent with the
feelings I had felt over the last few weeks. Moving to Dublin to pursue a
PhD had been bittersweet. The bitterness came from the loneliness I was
feeling in leaving home. The sweetness reflected a brand-new chapter in my
life. I would grow and change not just professionally, but personally.
I had high hopes that a change would do me good. The last couple of
years had been tough. In January 2003, my cousin and good friend Emmett
died at twenty-one from sudden arrhythmic death. Emmett played three
sports and was visibly healthy, so to say this was a shock is an
understatement. Then in September 2003, just after travelling to Barcelona
with my mum for her sixtieth birthday, we found out she had ovarian
cancer. It was very advanced by the time of diagnosis, and Mum sadly
passed away in March 2004 after six months of being intensely ill. Shortly
after that, my wonderful uncle, Emmett’s dad, passed away from lung
cancer, which was again diagnosed too late for treatment. To say that I had
weathered an emotional storm in that short time period is putting it mildly.
These three blows called for levels of resilience I sometimes did not have in
plentiful supply.
But on that day in October, as I drove to Dublin with Kevin, I would
need to summon resilience for something much more ordinary. Something
that shouldn’t have set my head swirling: the blow I was feeling from
leaving home. I was in my twenties, so moving out was natural. Plus, I
would see Dad again four days later when I visited for the weekend. And
pretty much every weekend after that for the next year. Nonetheless, the
emotional punch was real and had to be dealt with.
 DEFINING RESILIENCE

Resilience is not just coping with major life stressors and

tragedies. Resilience includes an ability to roll with the small,
everyday punches.

Life’s punches come in a variety of sizes. In this chapter we’ll look at

how behavioural science insights can help you handle everyday punches
rather than the ability to handle major life stressors and tragedies, which is
quite a different thing. The latter is indeed a key life skill, but it’s way
beyond the scope of this book, and I hope your big-thinking journey is free
of these events. But I know for sure that you will have to face a variety of
small blows as you pursue your new goal.
So what type of issues should you expect to deal with?
Depending on your level of resilience, you will define ‘punches’
differently. For someone with low resilience reserves, a work friend
hurrying past them in the corridor rather than exchanging happy greetings
as usual will be met with a worry that their friend was being rude or had
slighted them intentionally. In contrast, those with high resilience reserves
will assume that their friend is busy. They will not worry about the state of
their friendship until the pattern is repeated. For them, there has been no
punch because they don’t sweat the small stuff.
For high-resilience people, being rejected for a job, freelance gig or
having an idea batted down might be viewed as ‘you win some, you lose
some’, and they will use the rejection as a chance to reflect on what went
right and what went wrong. For those with low resilience, the confidence
knock may stop them putting themselves out there again. They may even
class the rejection as unfair and feel the world is against them.
Whatever you want to do with your life, I know one thing with certainty:
there will be ‘ups’ and ‘downs’. How you handle these ups and downs will
impact your ability to progress.
How resilient are you to everyday punches? Look at the box below, and
consider the lists of events that happen regularly in people’s lives. I want
you to imagine these events have happened to you and sort each of them
into one of three categories, as follows, making the appropriate mark next
to the event description:
1 These things happen – put an exclamation point next to the event.
2 I will have regrouped and got over it in a day – put a circle next to
the event.
3 This would really affect me and stop me in my tracks – put a star next
to the event.
Taking exams …

• You sit an exam and do not know the answers to a lot of the
questions.
• You failed.
• You ranked in the bottom 20 per cent in your class.
• You missed an exam because of bad traffic and have to wait
one year to retake it.
• You got a lower grade than expected.

Public speaking …
• You are sweating with nervousness before you go on to
speak.
• A person tells you a point you’re making is wrong.
• People are yawning throughout your talk and playing with
their phones.
• You faint in the middle of giving your talk.
• You are asked a question you cannot answer during the
Q&A.
• The feedback from your talk contains one response that
provides detailed commentary on why you should be
discredited.
• The feedback from your talk is largely negative.

Trying to grow a new client base …

• You send twenty emails to prospective clients and no one
responds.
• You send twenty emails to prospective clients, and three
reply with details on how your product/service does not
match their needs.
• You send twenty emails to prospective clients, and five
clients reply saying thanks but no thanks and that the
product is simply too expensive.
• A first meeting with a prospective client gets off on the
wrong foot.
• Your biggest client cancels their contract with you.

Navigating the day-to-day work environment …

• You have an important deadline, and a senior colleague
whose input you need is not responding to your emails or
calls.
• In an important meeting a colleague talks over you, and
drowns out an important point you want to make.
• Despite requesting to be put on a plum project at work, you
have not been chosen.
• A colleague misinterprets something you said to them in
casual conversation – and, despite you apologizing and
setting the record straight, continues their false narrative
and complains to your boss.
• You have been paired with a poorly performing colleague for
a particular project and they have dropped the ball.
• You emerge from your career development meeting feeling
patronized and none the wiser about what it will take to get
promoted.
• You are late on an important day at work because your train
broke down.
• Your boss makes a mistake and takes it out on you.

Searching for a new job …

• You have written tailored applications for twenty jobs and
have not got one call back.
• Despite an excellent first interview for your ideal role, you do
not get a call back.
• The job you are competing for has a task-based assessment
that you are pretty sure you just flunked.
• A job interview does not go very well.
• You miss a job interview because of being ill.
• You got the job you applied for but the pay is much lower
than your current salary.
How did you do? Ideally, the majority of the events should fall into ‘These
things happen’ or ‘I will have regrouped and got over it in a day’. It is truly
fantastic if this describes your current persona. But you’re in the minority.
If you had a few instances of ‘This would really affect me and stop me in
my tracks’, don’t worry. Most of us will overreact to temporary failures and
get grumpy when our day is more unpleasant than expected.
After doing this exercise, you may realize you have more resilience when
it comes to some of life’s blips over others. In general, you can expect to be
less resilient when you fail at something that plays a part in your personal
narratives. You may be very upset by a colleague misinterpreting what you
said to them. It could keep you up at night. In contrast, you may shrug off a
train delay which causes you to miss a meeting as soon as you finally reach
your destination. In this case, it is likely that you hold a narrative that you
are a thoughtful colleague, but punctuality isn’t part of your identity.

When we have bad luck or fail at something, we rely on

resilience.

Luckily, there are some insights from behavioural science that can help
build stores of resilience. These insights, if followed regularly, will allow
you to be more resilient when you fail or have bad luck, and perhaps get
you to a place where you do not notice everyday punches at all.
As in the other chapters, I will present ten behavioural science insights.
These are insights that lend themselves to helping people hone resistance,
while being relatively easy to integrate into even the busiest daily routines.
Don’t forget that while each behavioural science insight will help some of
you, they will not necessarily help all of you. Remember to evaluate the
success of each item you adopt personally after a week. Keep what is
working for you and discard the rest.

INSIGHT 1: RESILIENCE AND THE FUNDAMENTAL

ATTRIBUTION ERROR
As a thought experiment, imagine yourself walking a couple of streets from
your house on a rainy day. You are heading to an important meeting. A car
drives next to you going about twenty miles per hour over the speed limit,
splashing you from head to toe. What do you do?
 Many of us would curse under our breath. Some of us might curse aloud
at the driver as they speed off. Would it change your mood? For how long?
Minutes? Hours? Days? Many people would still be seething when they got
to their destination, with this story dominating conversation on arrival.
There are many similar thought experiments you can do. A colleague
arrives late to a meeting. A potential client makes a remark you perceive as
rude. Being kept on hold during a call to the bank.

Negative events – big or small – stay with us a lot longer than

positive events of equivalent size.

Could some of these events be caused by fundamental attribution error,

which we met in Chapter 5?
Let’s go back and revisit the thought experiment with the puddle-
splashing driver. What makes people so annoyed when they are splashed
with a puddle? How would you rate the scale of your annoyance from 1 to
10 – where 10 is extraordinarily annoyed – if you were in this situation?
What are your assumptions about that driver? You probably view them as
rude, arrogant and possibly even a bozo. Any other adjectives spring to
mind? Would the adjectives that you come up with change if you knew the
driver was in a hurry to get to the hospital to see their dying parent? Would
the adjectives be different if someone told you the driver was late for a job
interview, having been unemployed for months, and they were stressed? Or
what if there is another reason that evoked empathy in most of us without
hard hearts?
If you had knowledge of the context behind their behaviour, would it
have shortened the effect on your mood and changed your chain of
reaction? For many, the empathy evoked by the puddle-splasher’s
circumstances would likely lessen the bad mood.
Why do we reach so quickly for the bozo justification when we are
splashed? The answer is the fundamental attribution error. The act of the
driver going through the puddle is being viewed as a reflection of the
driver’s personality rather than simply the situation they are in. Next time,
question your anger and the underlying assumption that this is a driver that
just doesn’t give a rat’s behind. I’ll level with you: some drivers are bozos,
and will take pleasure in soaking your cotton socks. However, an intensely
negative reaction punishes you, and not the driver, by looming large over a
portion of your day that would otherwise be productive.
Of course, in this example we will never see the puddle-splashing driver
again. This means the impact of our reaction on our future relationship with
them is irrelevant. But what happens if we succumb to fundamental
attribution error when we react to an interaction with a client or co-worker?
We may chalk up a first meeting with a new client to getting off on the
wrong foot, without knowing that the client has been suffering from
insomnia for the last fortnight. Or we may assume a colleague is being rude
when they do not answer our emails. But perhaps they are dealing with a
personal crisis.
Does it matter? I think it does. Just like you wouldn’t want the permanent
label of ‘irresponsible’ if you missed a meeting because of illness, or would
like to be cut a break and allowed into an exam hall late if you experienced
train delays, other people experience bad luck and have tough experiences
that affect their day-to-day interactions. Next time this happens, remind
yourself of fundamental attribution error and it may take the sting out of an
initial interaction. It should help you move all of these types of occurrences
into the ‘These things happen’ category, making you more resilient to
everyday punches.

INSIGHT 2: DON’T LET FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER

I once got to sit in on a meeting of senior managers in a midsized firm that
involved a presentation from an expensive consultancy firm about diversity
and inclusion. There were pie charts, pillars and mind maps. We had run
about fifteen minutes over the allocated one hour, and it wasn’t clear that
the meeting was going to end soon, when a voice I didn’t know said, ‘If I
hear about psychological safety one more time, I’m going to throw myself
out the bloody window. This is all bulls***!’ I looked around the room at
the hung heads, clocked a couple of ‘eeek!’ faces, and watched as the
Interrupter swung open the door and left. It banged shut behind him. The
clearly mortified chair of the meeting apologized, and assured the presenter
this was an anomaly and that the rest of us were fully engaged. We carried
on. Yawn.
After the meeting there was a standing lunch, and nobody mentioned
what had happened. This made me all the more curious about the
Interrupter. When I had my palm-pressing time with the chair, I asked what
the man’s name was.
‘Oh, that’s Greg. Pay no attention to him. He’s not a major stakeholder in
our diversity and inclusion initiative. We don’t need his buy-in. We are all
committed to an inclusive workforce. It’s great to have your input …’
He may as well have patted me on the head to make it flatter, but at least
I now knew the name of the Interrupter, albeit it didn’t have the same ring
to it.
The Interrupter stayed on my mind. Perhaps I was captivated by the irony
of screaming ‘psychological safety is bulls***’ in a diversity and inclusion
meeting. Maybe I’m just nosy. Luckily for me, I was doing a short
consultancy at his firm and had many chances to run into the Interrupter.
The first time he seemed pleasant enough when he smiled and said hello.
The second time we had a similar encounter. By the third time, when he
offered me the last teabag in the staffroom, there was a sense of kindness
that offset his cameo as the Interrupter, and I bravely asked if he had time to
talk over his coffee (his second choice of beverage, as I nabbed the teabag).
I’m not a fan of chit-chat, so about fifty seconds into our impromptu
discussion I asked what his problem was with psychological safety. What
came next, I could not predict … He started to laugh. And laugh. And
laugh. I stood there awkwardly for at least three minutes.
Once his sides were sufficiently split, he asked me to come meet his
team.
What was striking about his team of twenty-plus people was that there
were women and men in equal number, and a noticeable black, Asian and
minority ethnic presence as compared to other floors. Everyone nodded
happily at him. A few shouted jovial greetings. The atmosphere didn’t have
the same frazzled feeling I had picked up on some of the other floors in the
same building. This was puzzling.
I would, in the week that followed, realize that the Interrupter’s team was
one of the best-performing in this company. This performance was
measured in terms of income generated, but the team also consistently
reported high levels of job satisfaction and happiness in pulse surveys.
I had judged the Interrupter incorrectly. How? My own biases and blind
spots had constructed a false narrative about the type of person he was.
First, I had suffered from illusory correlation. I had falsely perceived a
relationship between his tantrum and his attitude to equality at work. But no
such relationship existed. This unconscious error had helped me construct
an inaccurate narrative for the Interrupter. I thought blind eyes were being
turned to his bad leadership because money was being made. The reality?
The Interrupter was a man who cared deeply about diversity and inclusion.
He was annoyed at his firm for using box-checking exercises to avoid the
tough conversations about what was happening in other teams. He cared
about diversity and inclusion, and that was evident in his actions. He had
lashed out in the meeting because he felt that its purpose was virtue
signalling rather than a call for real action.
But illusory correlation wasn’t the only bias or blind spot that affected
me that day. I was also affected by the horn effect, a bias that causes one
unpleasant experience to attach other negative attributes to a person without
evidence.
First impressions are plagued by biases and blind spots. A negative first
interaction like mine can easily be internalized as a punch, with a promise
never to engage with the culprit again. Why not try to see negative first
experiences as a ‘These things happen’ event, and save your resilience
stores by avoiding the anxiety of worrying about them?

Giving people second chances and opportunities to clear up

misunderstandings is one of the kindest things we can do as
human beings.

For me, one of the best things I ever did was give the Interrupter an
opportunity to give feedback on what I saw as bad behaviour. I learned a lot
by engaging with him then, and we are still talking and learning from each
other today.
Please do not misunderstand me here. I do not want you to put yourself in
a position where you are consistently being exposed to bad behaviour by
any one individual. That would make the big-thinking journey you are
about to undertake miserable, and quickly erode your resilience stores.
Rather, I am asking that you give second chances. Put the boot on the other
foot; it will also be much easier for you to hone resilience if you know that
second chances are possible when you make mistakes!

INSIGHT 3: CELEBRATE SMALL WINS

Think back to the puddle-splashing thought experiment. Imagine yourself
walking a couple of blocks from your house on a rainy day. You see the
puddle and the approaching car too late to get out of the splash zone.
However, the driver has seen you. They slow in ample time to avoid
splashing you. What do you do?
For many of us, that is where this event ends. We will likely not
remember it when we arrive at our destination. We might be less likely to
wave our hand in gratitude in comparison with waving our fist in anger
when splashed. How many of us would smile and wish the driver a nice
day?
Okay! Okay! I get it – there is a cost to the splashing beyond an evil
deed: you get a good soaking. No one likes being wet! But consider
receiving a compliment from a client versus an insult. Increasing your
earnings by £100 per week versus losing £100 a week. Whether it is a loss
to our self-esteem or a loss to our pocket, loss aversion causes negative
events to loom larger over our day when they happen as compared to
comparable positive events.
Loss aversion, if left unchecked, causes any loss you experience to feel
many times harder than an equivalent gain in emotional currency. We met
anticipatory loss aversion in Chapter 4 as an explanation as to why people
hold themselves back when going for a promotion or a pitch. In this case,
people were holding themselves back because they were anticipating the
losses that may come from failing. Now, the loss isn’t imagined; it is very
real. As a rule of thumb, you can expect to suffer a real loss twice as much
as you would benefit from an equivalent gain.1 So what does this mean for
resilience?
Some of you will be taking risks in setting up a business. The business
may excel for a while and then go into decline. Some of you will need to
make downward moves in your organization to shift to a role that you find
more interesting, and take a pay cut that bites. Recognizing that you won’t
acknowledge the joy of your ascent as much as you will feel the pain of
your decline may be enough to make you stop, pause and acknowledge
accomplishments when you do experience a success.
Keeping loss aversion alive in your mind can help in building resilience,
as you are aware of its power to impact on you and can take steps to limit
the damage. However, loss aversion is ingrained in us like any reflex, so
this strategy will only get you so far. Shifting your attitude to balance losses
and gains may be more easily done if you also make conscious efforts to
shift your focus towards celebrating gains more regularly. How? On a daily
basis, take stock of what has gone well. You can think of this as practising
present-day gratitude because it relates directly to something that is
happening now.
Can this simple exercise really build resilience? There is evidence to
suggest that it can. One innovative study highlighted clearly the link
between resilience and gratitude. Conducted by Rosanna Lau and Sheung-
Tak Cheng in 2011, the participants – who were all Chinese adults aged
fifty-five and over – were randomly divided into three groups. The first
group was asked to write about life events that they were grateful for. The
second group was asked to write about life events that they worried about.
The third group was given a neutral task that did not involve any personal
emotion. The researchers then assessed how anxious their participants were
about dying – a topic that the researchers expect to be on their participants’
minds – and found that those who had practised gratitude as part of the
earlier exercise were far more resilient to contemplating death as compared
to the two other groups.
Is there evidence beyond older adults? Yes, using a similar set-up. One
such study was conducted by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough in
2003. They focused on resilience in college students, and found that
practising gratitude caused higher levels of life satisfaction, better mood
and fewer headaches up to ten weeks after practice. These are big gains
from a small action. Simple expressions of gratitude can really pay
dividends in beefing up resilience reserves. What is more, expressing
gratitude has also been linked to lower levels of depression – as well as
increased happiness and better self-esteem.2

Consciously making a decision to acknowledge small ‘wins’ is

a great way to start practising gratitude and increase
resilience.

This doesn’t need to be a big deal. You don’t even have to write it down
– although many people enjoy practising daily gratitude in this way. All that
is required is taking five minutes each day (setting a regular time will help
make it a habit), and purposely drawing your attention to all of the feel-
good moments you experienced over the last twenty-four hours.
 From big wins to small positive moments, drawing attention to these
occurrences on a daily basis, however ordinary they are, engages your slow
brain (System 2). Ensuring that these moments don’t go unnoticed helps
rebalance how you feel about losses when they do happen. This allows you
to put negative occurrences into perspective.
We all have ups and downs, and it is good to curtail tendencies that focus
too much on losses and ignore gains.
So start now, and write three small wins you experienced so far today:

1) ______________
2) ______________
3) ______________

INSIGHT 4: THE ABILITY TO THINK BIG AND TAKE SMALL

STEPS IS A PRIVILEGE
At seven years old, pizza and movies were enough to give me a respite from
any stressful occurrence. As an adult in my thirties, I choose walks and
Martinis when I need a timeout from routine stressful events, and three-day
trips when things seem to be going haywire.
I would not notice unless I was paying attention to it, but being able to
engage in time-outs like these is a privilege. It is also a privilege to be able
to think big, take small steps and build the career you want.
You can help to hone resilience by reminding yourself how lucky you are
to be able to think big and set about realizing your dreams, while also
calling to mind that the knocks you receive along the way are just part of
the journey. The sheer fact that you get to go on this journey is a privilege
rather than a chore.
This is distinct from practising gratitude when you have small wins.
There you are reacting to an event that has already happened. Here I am
suggesting that you consciously practise gratitude for the choices that you
have in your life, and specifically the choice to take small steps every day
towards the big-thinking goal you want.
Around the world, there are millions of people who wake up and do not
have the luxury to think big. Some are struggling to make ends meet. Others
have their opportunities constrained by tradition or government. Others
have to prioritize focusing on their own or a family member’s health for
now. Others aren’t able to work.
 Thinking big and designing a plan to get there is something
that you get to do rather than have to do.

We have already discussed the power of framing messages to other

people in a positive way. For the small steps associated with your big-
thinking goal, frame them as something that you ‘get to do’. Doing so is a
natural way to instil gratitude for the opportunities that you have. Remind
yourself that you are always moving forward, regardless how small your
steps are, once you are routinely engaged in the activities you identified in
Chapter 2. Remind yourself that getting to engage in these activities is
something to be grateful for in and of itself.
Practising gratitude in this way can hone resilience, and also help
weather the phases on your big-thinking journey when you have a steep
learning curve or are tackling a lengthy project. It can also act as a reality
check when something goes wrong, so you don’t overreact and internalize
stress, reducing your resilience stores.

INSIGHT 5: COMPARISONS MATTER

I was asked to give a general interest talk to a large firm in 2015, on lessons
from behavioural science and resilience. On the day of the talk, I had a high
level of energy and I could feel it being reciprocated. I got to the part of my
talk where I discussed the hedonic treadmill, a well-known cause for why
people do not end up happier when they move ahead in life in terms of
income or other status-related goal – because there is always someone else
who is achieving more or doing better. We are never done keeping up with
the Joneses. There is always someone – somewhere – you could perceive
as doing better than you. In a world of Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat,
finding them has become even easier.
Just then, I noticed a hand raised in the audience. It was a senior
managing director. Grabbing the opportunity to take a big glug of water, I
encouraged him to shout out his question with a wave of my hand.
‘This has been the biggest difficulty managing people for me,’ he said.
‘Regardless of how well a person is doing, they are always dissatisfied
come bonus day when I am forced to whip out the graph that shows them
where their payment is, relative to colleagues who have the same position.
Is the transparency worth the misery?’
 These days, a call for transparency around pay has led to many big firms
showing employees how they are doing as compared to their peers. Because
few of us would be comfortable seeing ourselves ranked below average by
our employer on any metric, this exercise can serve to make salient how far
we are away from the Joneses in a very explicit manner. I am all for
transparency around pay – it has been shown to increase the tendency for
groups who commonly don’t ask for pay increases to come forward more
regularly, like women. However, making the day that performance pay is
doled out a day to draw attention to relative pay does not make sense if you
care about employee well-being and satisfaction. Perhaps this should be the
day to draw attention to a graph that shows how far employees have come
on their own career journey instead.

You will draw less on your own resilience reserves if you focus
on your absolute progress, and avoid comparisons with
others.

This requires a mindset shift. Are you inclined to keep up with the
Joneses? Do you compare your wins to those of people that you know or
are exposed to regularly? Or do you view wins absolutely, by monitoring
your own progress? If I compare myself to other people, I am making
relative comparisons. If I am monitoring my own progress over time, I am
making absolute comparisons.
It can be hard to focus only on absolute comparisons, but it will pay
resilience dividends.
Imagine you are trying to lose weight. Relative comparisons would mean
that you judge your progress compared to what others in your weight-loss
group achieve each week. You would only be happy with a three-pound loss
in weeks where others lost relatively less. Sound absurd? On too many
occasions, we automatically measure our progress in terms of relative rather
than absolute comparisons.
When you were younger and got your exam grades, did your parents ask
you how others in the class did when they were reacting to your grades?
Did you compare yourself to how well your friends did? If you were given
a pay rise, and at the same time learned that everyone else in your
workplace got more than you, would you be miffed? Would it take the shine
off of your fatter pay cheque?
 Focusing on absolute over relevant comparisons will help keep you
performing better, speeding up your progress and maintaining your
resilience reserves. Alongside my anecdotes are gold-star academic papers
that support these sentiments and emphasize that relative comparisons hurt
performance.3 And if better performance isn’t a reason to shun relative
comparisons in favour of your own progress, then do it for your well-
being.4 What’s the point in looking over your shoulder for someone else to
compare yourself to? For a healthier attitude to progress, simply make
salient your own progress compared to yesterday.

INSIGHT 6: REFOCUS YOUR ATTENTION

The day that I experienced my greatest-ever embarrassment, the sun was
shining, it was the height of summer and I was upside down. I was seven
years old, and – hanging from the monkey bars – my tiny little face flushed
red when I split my favourite shorts. Hoping nobody would see, I tried to
scramble down but was met with a chorus of laughter from the fifty or so
boys who attended the local school.
What are the earliest good life lessons you remember? For me, I learned
that the best way to recover from an embarrassing moment in the
playground is to find something else to take your mind off it. On that
summer’s day it was pizza and Gremlins (a movie that set out to be a horror
but ended up being a comedy).
Turned down by a client? Rejected for a promotion? Had a writing
submission ignored? Received a grumpy email from a colleague? Got into
an argument with your business partner? When something bad happens, it
can be worthwhile to take yourself out of that situation for a moment, and to
do something else that takes your mind off it. When you do have to address
the situation, your resilience reserves will have recovered somewhat. This
also serves to minimize the likelihood of the affect heuristic, that mental
shortcut that causes decisions and reactions to be impacted by emotions
(which is not necessarily in your best interests).

TAKING YOUR MIND OFF A STRESSFUL SITUATION

What do I do when I need to take my mind off things? It may come as no
surprise that I have a ten-item menu to choose from, depending on the
occasion:
 1 Walking my dog Kacey in Richmond Park.
2 Bootcamp Pilates.
3 Reading fiction.
4 Having a Martini with a friend.
5 Immersing myself in theatre or a film.
6 Switching my phone off and wandering around London.
7 Finding flow with my research.
8 Getting a Thai massage.
9 Visiting somewhere isolated.
10 Visiting my family in Cork.
What should you do as a timeout? If you are someone that benefits from
meditation, then go and do that,5 but each person has their own thing. How
we relax and gain perspective is personal, and discovering what works for
you will help you endlessly in life. What you do may also depend on the
magnitude of the failure or problem that you are dealing with. Most times I
don’t need to head to an isolated location and go off the grid! It can be
enough to take Kacey to Richmond Park for an hour. Watching my
bulldog’s excitement as she finds a puddle to splash in or a dusty path to
roll around in is all I need in those times. Being with Kacey, who is very
much in the moment, puts me in the moment, too. It allows me to forget my
troubles.
Take a moment now to write down your own ways of taking a timeout
from the world:

1) _______________________
2) _______________________
3) _______________________
4) _______________________
5) _______________________
6) _______________________
7) _______________________
8) _______________________
9) _______________________
10) _______________________

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes, ‘Nothing in life is as

important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.’ If you allow a
negative event that has occurred to occupy your mind, it will do just that –
making a mountain out of a molehill. If you find yourself in an
embarrassing situation, call to mind the spotlight effect (see p. 159). Odds
are that other people are too busy fussing over their own mistakes and
misdemeanours to care much about your cock-up. It’s much easier to dust
yourself off after failure when the realization dawns that very few people
have noticed it.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that you go away forever. Nor am I
suggesting that feelings should be buried deep down or that you deny
yourself a moment to scream out in fury in the comfort of your own home. I
am, however, suggesting that after experiencing an ‘I will have regrouped
and got over it in a day’ or ‘This would really affect me and stop me in my
tracks’ situation, you retreat for a while and focus on something else before
taking any action.
If the failure or problem calls for decisions to be made, it really is better
that you do not react in the moment. Just do yourself a favour and put some
time between your heightened emotions and any binding decisions or
actions. Most of the time, the big decisions in life allow for this breathing
space, even if prompted by what seems at the time to be a catastrophe. So
take that bit of breathing room. Don’t send an angry email or throw a silly
tantrum. It is fine to tell anyone asking you to react in the moment that you
need some time to regroup, and it is not okay that they put you on the spot.
Take that time to regroup, de-stress and build resilience.

INSIGHT 7: REVISIT YOUR TIME-SINKERS

Yesterday, I ate takeaway for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I didn’t go for a
walk. I spent my time in unnecessary meetings, four of them with no
agenda. People discussed their half-baked ideas. People spoke only to hear
the sound of their own voice. I slowly lost the will to live. Last night I got
four hours of interrupted sleep. My ability to buffer any stresses that may
come my way today is pretty much zero. My resilience stores are truly
depleted.
Yesterday I spent my most precious resource – time – badly.
In Chapter 3, you took some time to identify time-sinkers. You may have
noticed that I identified unnecessary meetings just now. This is not to be
mistaken with the time I spend speaking to people to explore collaborations,
advance projects or just to connect. Those are interactions I cannot do
without. Unnecessary meetings are something that I can most definitely live
without.
You will have days when it seems like your time has evaporated into thin
air. The knock-on effect is that you will not get any productive work done
and you will not achieve flow. By the end of the day it will feel like nothing
has been accomplished. When you are carrying this feeling, you will be less
resilient and are less likely to roll with the punches. On these days, or
perhaps one day after, it is worth doing a time audit of the day that you had,
to identify the activities you engaged in that caused your lack of progress.
Had you already identified these as time-sinkers in Chapter 3? Perhaps you
had a blind spot and didn’t identify them then? Perhaps these are activities
you do not think you can get out of? Can you challenge this assumption?

Identifying activities in your day that drain you, and cutting

them down or avoiding them outright, will help protect your
resilience levels.

It also frees up time to spend on the small steps you need to take to
realize your big-thinking goal. Up to this point, these small steps have
related to the skills that you wish to develop and the activities you want to
be engaged in for your big-thinking goal. Now I would ask that you
reassess how you are spending your time, and replace activities that drain
you (like unnecessary emails) with things that replenish you. The
cornerstone of this has to be eating healthy foods and moving your body
more. If you eat better and get more exercise, you will find you have more
energy and a clearer head. This can motivate a virtuous cycle where you
become even more focused and confident in your ability to achieve your
big-thinking goal, and also more resilient.
In the last section, you identified activities to engage in when you need a
timeout. You chose these activities because engaging in them makes you
feel better. Along with setting intentions to eat better and move more, why
not incorporate one or more of these timeout activities into your weekly
planning? You don’t wait until your car breaks down to invest in its
maintenance, so why wait until your resilience reserves are empty to top
them up?

INSIGHT 8: MEASURING YOUR RESILIENCE

As an academic, I get rejected a lot. It is part of the job. I write papers, and
even those with high levels of creativity get rejected.
I say it is ‘part of the job’ because if you are an academic that is not
getting rejected by journals, you are certainly not aiming high enough. It is
easy to get published in a low-ranking journal, and much harder to get
published in the very top international journals. I can say for sure that I
have become much more resilient to rejection over the years because it has
allowed me to stay in a job that I love. But is it possible to know how your
resilience levels are improving? And can this knowledge help hone further
resilience? Can resilience be measured?
In Chapter 3 we discussed that what gets measured gets done. By
measuring and monitoring our progress, we are – by default – paying
attention to it. Our progress has increased saliency. We are blatantly aware
of improvements, and these gains help spur us on.
The same is true with resilience. In the same way that saliency helps you
stick to your small-step activities because they are at the forefront of your
mind, you will find it easier to continue investing in your resilience if you
are aware that your reserves are increasing.
But to audit our resilience levels, we need to measure them. How that is
done is not so obvious …
If you could buy resilience in a bottle, what would it look like? Would
the ingredients be 50 per cent hardiness and 50 per cent mental toughness?
Research suggests that people blessed with high levels of resilience are also
likely to have these two personality traits.6 You can measure how your
resilience levels are changing by monitoring your scores on a brief
resilience scale that captures these traits.
Owed to Bruce Smith and colleagues and introduced in 2008, the scale
has six statements as follows:
1 I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times.
2 I have a hard time making it through stressful events.
3 It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event.
4 It is hard for me to snap back when something bad happens.
5 I usually come through difficult times with little trouble.
6 I tend to take a long time to get over setbacks in my life.
When considering these six statements, you should assess whether you
strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree or strongly
agree.
For questions one, three and five, scoring is 1=strongly disagree,
2=disagree, 3=neutral, 4=agree and 5=strongly agree. For questions two,
four and six, the scoring is 5=strongly disagree, 4=disagree, 3=neutral,
2=agree and 1=strongly agree. The higher your score, the more resilient you
are.
When beginning to audit your resilience levels, never make any
judgement on where your starting point is. Improvement is always what you
need to focus on. Remember that absolute – rather than relative – progress
is what matters. Simply focus on truthfully scoring your responses to the
statements above every six months, and pay attention to whether your score
increases over your big-thinking journey.
The simple act of making your progress salient can keep you investing in
your own resilience.

INSIGHT 9: REDEFINING PUNCHES

We started this chapter discussing how different people will define what an
everyday punch is differently. But people also change over time. One of the
biggest things that has changed for me over the last decade is how I have
redefined what an everyday punch is, allowing me to no longer sweat the
small stuff.
Rather than measuring resilience in the manner described in the last
section, you can also make your progress salient by reflecting on how your
coping skills are changing in your regular weekly planning session. This is
easy to do, and requires that you make a list of all of the negative things that
have happened over the last week. As we did at the beginning of the
chapter, categorize these events into ‘These things happen’, ‘I will have
regrouped and got over it in a day’ and ‘This would really affect me and
stop me in my tracks’. You are increasing in resilience if you notice a
relative increase in the first two categories, as compared to the number in
the third.
Of course, as you increase in resilience, how you define a negative event
will also change. If you notice that the list of weekly negative things is
getting significantly shorter over the course of your journey, you can have
faith that you are rolling with everyday punches much more often. This
happens because events that made the list at the beginning of your journey,
such as a colleague throwing an unnecessary tantrum or you getting
negative feedback, are no longer showing up.

The joy of not sweating the small stuff is that the small stuff is
not even remembered. This frees up your time to focus on
what really matters.

Do distinguish between rolling with the punches and allowing yourself to

be punched unnecessarily. As a general rule, I don’t blink if a colleague
throws a tantrum. However, I am not someone to be held hostage, and if it
is a regular occurrence I just silently write them out of my schedule.

INSIGHT 10: SLEEP

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
‘Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you
live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more attractive. It
keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and
dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and
stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed,
and less anxious.’
The above paragraph is from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. This
book does a great job in detailing convincing evidence that sleep really is a
panacea for many afflictions that affect our well-being. For the purposes of
this book, healthy sleep habits make you more resilient. Sleep is also a good
response mechanism when you have had a stressful day.
I do love sleep. I find it restores me when things get tough.

After a good night’s sleep, you should be better able to roll

with life’s punches.

A solid seven hours’ sleep gives me the energy I need to be engaged

when meeting colleagues, collaborators and students, and also makes me
more likely to find flow in my continuous learning. The optimal amount of
sleep may vary from person to person, but knowing how much sleep you
need and putting structures in place to ensure you get it is a commitment to
self-care that pays dividends in terms of resilience and beyond.
 TOP TIP: GETTING BETTER SLEEP
To help you sleep better, choose one or more of the
suggestions below to integrate into your routine. Like all of the
behavioural insights we have discussed before, use a trial-
and-error approach when trying these out:

1 Go to bed and wake up at the same time each night and

morning.
2 Limit exposure to bright lights one hour before sleeping.
3 Commit to an unwinding period an hour ahead of bedtime
that is free of screens of any kind.
4 Do not keep your phone or any other electronic device in
the bedroom.
5 Avoid caffeine four hours before bedtime, and add a
relaxing drink like hot milk or a herbal tea to your unwinding
period.
6 Avoid eating heavy meals four hours before you go to bed.
7 Keep your sleeping area clutter-free.
8 Invest in breathable fabrics like cotton for your sheets,
pillowcases, duvet covers and sleepwear.
9 Keep your room between 15 and 22 degrees Celsius,
monitoring how you sleep within this range to isolate the
perfect temperature for you.
10 Keep your room dark while you zzzzzz.

PERSEVERE
Higher levels of resilience make you more likely to persevere. This
particular life skill also correlates with higher levels of happiness, better
mental health, fewer days lost to ill health, higher levels of innovation, and
improved motivation. This makes investing in increasing your resilience
levels very much worth your while.7
Back in 2004 when I made the move from Cork to Dublin, my resilience
reserves were low. Lucky for me, my friend Kevin was in the driving seat
(both literally and figuratively) that day to take my mind off things and
assure me that the feelings would pass. It is worth emphasizing that at times
when you aren’t able to rely on your own resilience reserves, you can and
should lean on a friend. Life is too short to always face the punches alone,
particularly when we don’t have to.
Of course, dealing with punches is not all bad. Being exposed to negative
situations in itself builds resilience. Weathering storms brings benefits. It
provides evidence of your coping skills. When you fail and persevere, you
are building evidence that you are gritty. When you come out the other end
of bad office politics with collegial relationships intact, you build evidence
that you are respected. When you don’t internalize someone else’s
negativity, you build evidence that you are strong. When you emerge from
change intact, you build evidence that you are a survivor. Evidence creates
a new positive narrative about your character that you then internalize.
This chapter has been about providing behavioural science insights that
can help cultivate resilience. Let’s recap them …
INSIGHT 1: RESILIENCE AND THE FUNDAMENTAL
ATTRIBUTION ERROR
Next time you have a negative encounter, remind yourself of
fundamental attribution error. It may help you downgrade the
encounter so it doesn’t affect your mood.

INSIGHT 2: DON’T LET FIRST IMPRESSIONS MATTER

First impressions are plagued by biases, blind spots and
heuristics. Giving second chances and clearing up
misunderstandings is one of the kindest things we can do as
human beings.

INSIGHT 3: CELEBRATE SMALL WINS

Call to mind small wins on a daily basis.

INSIGHT 4: THE ABILITY TO THINK BIG AND TAKE

SMALL STEPS IS A PRIVILEGE
Remind yourself daily that the sheer fact that you get to think
big, take small steps and build the career you want is a
privilege rather than a chore.

INSIGHT 5: COMPARISONS MATTER

Focus on absolute over relative comparisons to keep you
performing better.

INSIGHT 6: REFOCUS YOUR ATTENTION

When something bad happens, take yourself out of that
situation and do an activity that takes your mind off it, to
circumvent the affect heuristic.

INSIGHT 7: REVISIT YOUR TIME-SINKERS

Guard your time from time-sinkers that deplete your resilience
reserves. Reallocate this time to an activity that replenishes
you.

INSIGHT 8: MEASURING YOUR RESILIENCE

 Make the progress from your investments in resilience salient
by auditing your resilience levels with a validated measuring
tool.

INSIGHT 9: REDEFINING PUNCHES

Make the progress from your investments in resilience salient
by paying attention to whether you are redefining what a
punch is.

INSIGHT 10: SLEEP

Sleep.

Trialling these insights allows you to hone resilience. As your resilience

reserves improve, you will notice that experiencing failure and problems in
your journey becomes less of a big deal. You will see the learning in these
new experiences instead. You will reframe what has happened as something
challenging to overcome rather than a permanent obstacle. Dealing with
punches is viewed as part of the ride. You take a punch, get up and move
on. You adapt.

Happy honing!
Before we move on you should have:
Made a list of the negative events that you experienced over
the last week and sorted these events into three separate
categories: ‘These things happen’, ‘I will have regrouped and
got over it in a day’ and ‘This would really affect me and stop
me in my tracks’.
Chosen one or more of the insights in this chapter to
incorporate into your journey.

FIVE FAB BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS:

1 Psychological safety: An environment where people are

secure in the knowledge that when they speak up there will
be no punishment or humiliation.

2 Illusory correlation: The phenomenon of perceiving a

relationship between variables when no such relationship
exists.

3 Horn effect: A bias that causes one unpleasant experience

to attach other negative attributes to a person without
evidence.

4 Keeping up with the Joneses: Using a comparison with

others as a benchmark for your own success.

5 Increased saliency: Draws attention to the benefits of an

action and makes a person more likely to keep on doing it.
 CHAP T E R 8

Journey

Across the world, every day, people decide that they need to make a change
at work. Many of you will have come to this book aiming to shake things
up. You want to earn a living doing something better than what you do
currently. What ‘better’ means will be personal to each and every one of
you, but that doesn’t mean that the principles to get there are different.
You may want to be happier at work, be more autonomous or do
something that motivates you. You could be seeking personal fulfilment or
looking for work that is socially responsible, or aiming for more money,
status or power. You may want to work with people or work in solitude.
You may want to be creative, innovative or work with numbers. What
determines your wants are your values and preferences. These are different
for all of us, and they change as we go through life.
The size of the goal you are shooting for will also differ. Some will plan
to accelerate their career. Others will want to do a lateral move. More still
will start a side hustle. Others will want to change career track altogether.
What you all have in common is that you are more likely to succeed if
you put in place a plan that has structures to help circumvent your own
biases and blind spots, as well as those of others.
Making the big-thinking journey a medium-term expedition is going to
increase the odds of succeeding because the upheaval to your life is not too
great. The core of this book set out a framework to help you do that, and
there is value to returning to these pages throughout your big-thinking
journey.
As you leave these pages you will have salient in your mind some well-
defined goal to aim for, as laid out in Chapter 2. This is your big-thinking
goal. You created it when you took the time to think big and decided on
what work you wanted ME+ to be doing for a living. Linked to this goal
you will have identified a set of activities that allow you to achieve it. These
are the small steps, which if taken regularly will allow you to realize your
goal. In Chapter 2, you also spent some time reflecting on the personal
narratives that are holding you back. Once these narratives are identified,
they can be changed by engaging in processes that align with the new story
you want to write for yourself. For example, if you hold a belief that you
always quit striving for goals that you set for yourself, focus on showing up
for the small steps you also identified in Chapter 2. The small steps are then
a process. By engaging in this process repeatedly, a new narrative emerges
that replaces the older, negative narrative. Draw attention to the progress
you are making by having weekly check-ins. Making the progress salient
brings the benefits of the process to the forefront of your mind, motivating
you further.
Time is your most precious resource. Spend it well. To give you time
back so you can take regular small steps and realize your big-thinking goal,
in Chapter 3 you identified your time-sinkers and made commitments to
curtail them. To help keep these promises you made to yourself, you were
given ten behavioural science insights. Do remember to pay attention to the
effects these insights have on you as you incorporate them into your regular
routine. You are unique and special, and different things work for different
people. If you adopt an insight and it works for you, keep doing it.
Otherwise, stop. This is trial-and-error learning.
As you finish this book you should recognize that your own cognitive
biases will interfere with both your planning and the journey itself. Don’t
underestimate the challenge associated with curbing these biases. Many
biases are engaged by System 1, your fast brain, at an unconscious level.
You might be able to see logically how you could develop a bias, but it is
difficult to stop automatic responses. To help yourself with this, you should
have chosen some insights from Chapter 4 to integrate into your big-
thinking journey. Doing so makes it more likely that your journey will be
successful. Bon voyage!
Of course, it isn’t all about you. In Chapter 5 we discussed how the
cognitive biases of others can hold you back. Should you care? It is all very
well to say no, you shouldn’t – sod them! But what if the person – or
persons – with the biases and blind spots can influence your progress? It is
probably best to circumvent the issue, rather than suffering the progress
blow. To help with this, Chapter 5 provided insights that will help you
navigate around the biases and blind spots of others. You should refer back
to these insights when other people get in the way of your progress. This
includes hindering your ability to take regular small steps, and putting
major obstacles in your way. Remember you can always reach out if you
find yourself in a situation that seems insurmountable!
The environment that we live and breathe in most definitely affects our
performance, motivation, perseverance, and the choices we make at any
given moment. Learnings from behavioural science provide insights into
what modifications may help reinforce your big-thinking journey. In
Chapter 6 we covered tweaks that you can make to your own physical
environment which can improve the chances of you reaching your big-
thinking goal. The fantastic thing is that giving a small amount of attention
to air, green, light, temperature, noise, space, clutter and colour can pay
dividends. This chapter also covered changes you can make to your
environment to stop digital interruptions – the ultimate time-sinker! You
should now be leaving this book with a commitment to engage with online
communications differently. We discussed picking your biggest distractor
and intentionally setting up your digital environment so you only engage on
one device and at particular times of your day. Trust me – it works!
And last but definitely not least, Chapter 7 discussed behavioural science
insights that can help you hone resilience. Here we focused on developing
resilience that will allow you to roll with everyday punches. Investing in
honing resilience can also have positive impacts on your life outside your
big-thinking journey. This core life skill correlates with higher levels of
happiness, better mental health, fewer days lost to ill health, higher levels of
innovation and improved motivation. Higher resilience levels also allow
you to bounce back more easily from (or not even notice!) setbacks in your
journey, setting you up to realize your chosen goal.
These six chapters, and the six key messages within them, are a
framework for your big-thinking journey. Return to this book to remind
yourself of the insights in each chapter from time to time. Although I have
been writing with career-building in mind, the lessons in these chapters can
also help you pursue other goals. For instance, Chapter 3, which discusses
time-sinkers, is relevant when you need to make more space for family,
self-care and your social life. Some of the messages on curbing your own
biases in Chapter 4 are useful when trying to understand why you don’t
show up for yourself when you set health or financial goals. And paying
attention to the tools described in Chapter 7 with respect to honing
resilience will serve you well in all areas of life.
I hope the content of this book helps you reach your big-thinking goal
with time to spare. It is exciting to set off on a career journey with intention.
As I’ve emphasized throughout the book, any outcome is the product of
luck and effort. So let me take this opportunity to wish you lots of good
luck! I have every faith that you will put in sustained effort and meet your
ME+ in the next few years. In the meantime, enjoy the journey!
On your journey, remember that those you meet along the way are also
striving for their best lives. They have doubts, worries and feel pain just like
you. Whenever you encounter people, you don’t know what is going on in
their lives. They may be hitting obstacles, or having a tough time. They
may be falling victim to their own or others’ biases and blind spots. They
may not have high resilience levels. They may need you to help them with
their journey. We’ve seen how other people can scupper your best-laid
plans. For the people you meet, you are ‘other people’. So when you meet
others, pause. It takes just a moment to give a kind greeting. There is
always room in your diary to lend a helping hand. Practise patience when
others make mistakes. Respect them as you expect to be respected. Slow
down and pay attention. When we are racing around, System 1 allows us to
perform pretty well on autopilot, but it can also cause us to miss moments
when other people need us to notice them. Those moments are worth giving
time to.

Slow down, pay attention and always be kind.

Happy beginnings!
You can contact me by emailing g.lordan@lse.ac.uk
 Acknowledgements

The saying goes that it takes a village. For this book it took a city. London. I
am particularly grateful to all of the people who have shared their stories
and anecdotes with me in the City of London and beyond. It is learning of
their experiences that has allowed me to get a clearer image of how
behavioural biases hold people back in their careers, and what can be done
about it. The number of people who have welcomed me into their offices
and lives – across all levels of industry and beyond – since I landed in
London in 2011, continues to astound me. Thank you for trusting me with
your stories, pushing on my theories, and for your friendship.
Thank you to Michael Alcock, my utterly fantastic agent, and also his
colleagues at Johnson and Alcock. Thank you to Teresa Almedia, who
helped me for the last mile to finish on time. Thank you to Penguin Life for
taking a chance on me, and Julia Murday for managing me through this
process. Thank you to Jack Ramm and Lydia Yadi, my editors, who worked
in the shadows to push this project to a different level. Thank you to all the
other great people at Penguin who contributed to this book, with a special
mention for Gemma Wain. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience
than I was given.
I am grateful every single day that I work at the LSE, and for the
opportunities it has afforded me to meet the brilliant people who work
within its walls. I would like to thank all of the colleagues who have
supported me across the school over the years. Time is truly our most
precious resource, and I have benefited greatly from taking the time of so
many others at the LSE across a multitude of departments to discuss the
ideas in this book and beyond. A good colleague has pointed out to me that
if I forget someone I will be in trouble, so leveraging the Barnum effect, I
will simply say a big thank you and ‘you know who you are’. I will, though,
specifically thank all of my co-authors, scattered around the world, for
pushing me to do better work and actually finish papers! And also the
behavioural science gang. I have been truly privileged to work with you as
we grow behavioural science at the LSE together. A special mention goes to
all of my students, and in particular to the first cohort of the MSc in
Behavioural Science students, who joined us in 2019 and were with me
while I wrote this book and through the COVID-19 lockdown. And also
thank you to all of my colleagues who have helped work towards launching
The Inclusion Initiative at the LSE.
I am indebted to my partner, Kieran. He has been a sounding board for
my ideas, has read various drafts, never lets me down, and made me
uncountable cups of tea while I worked every weekend and every evening
on this book for months on end. Thank you. Dog lovers will understand
why I can’t leave these pages without mentioning Kacey, my beautiful
bulldog, the perfect mascot. Walking and relaxing with her adds
unmeasurable value to my life. Having her snoring next to me while I hit
flow in my own work is the perfect background music.
I deservedly dedicated this book to my mum, who I continue to miss
dearly. Mum paved the way for all of my opportunities in life, always
cheering me on. To know her was to know someone who was extraordinary.
I also need to thank all of my family and friends in my home town of Cork
for their encouragement. I give special mention to Olive Desmond, my first
boss, who all of those years ago showed me leadership through kindness.
And to my dad and my aunt Marie, I could not have done this without you.
You consistently welcome me home and take care of me whenever I want to
drop by. You have been unwavering constants in my support system
throughout my life, and this has meant the world to me. You are also
fantastic company and I cannot wait to see you both soon.
And last but by no means least, I need to thank you. As a reader you have
given me your time while reading this book. This has been my privilege. I
hope you do think big, take small steps and build the career you want.

Happy endings!
 Notes
Chapter 1: Begin
1 This comes through most clearly in research published by Dan
Gilbert and colleagues in Science magazine in 2013. They studied
more than 19,000 people and got them to report on how much
they perceived themselves having changed in the past decade, and
also asked them to predict how much they would change in the
next ten years. People of all ages consistently said they had
changed lots in the past but expected relatively little for the
future. See J. Quoidbach, D. T. Gilbert and T. D. Wilson, ‘The
end of history illusion’, Science 339/6115 (2013), pp. 96–98.

Chapter 2: Goal
1 In behavioural science we know that most of us want to follow
what the crowd is doing. This is called ‘herding’. I therefore want
to take this opportunity to tell you that 80 per cent of the readers
of this book will likely complete this exercise – in an effort to
harness social norms, and increase the likelihood that you will
complete it, too.
2 It is even possible to consider the effects of stereotype threat by
introducing an intervention to a random selection of children that
primes them explicitly prior to taking a maths exam. An example
of an explicit prime is to include an illustration of a girl failing to
solve a maths problem. A random selection of students taking an
exam sees this picture, and gets a heavy hint that girls are bad at
maths. This was the research approach taken in a study of 240
six-year-old children. The researchers gathered data prior to the
maths test being taken or the picture being seen which indicated
that there was no difference in actual perceptions regarding the
mathematical ability of girls versus boys held by the children in
the study. The authors highlight that, even without prior beliefs
that girls are worse at maths than boys, being exposed to the
stereotype threat caused them to perform worse than when they
had no stereotype threat. See S. Galdi, M. Cadinu and C.
 Tomasetto, ‘The roots of stereotype threat: When automatic
associations disrupt girls’ math performance’, Child Development
85/1 (2014), pp. 250–263.
3 The heritability of intelligence is estimated to be between 20 and
60 per cent, depending on the life stage the sample is in. See C.
Haworth et al., ‘A twin study of the genetics of high cognitive
ability selected from 11,000 twin pairs in six studies from four
countries’, Behavior Genetics 39/4 (2009), pp. 359–370; and also
R. Plomin and I. J. Deary, ‘Genetics and intelligence differences:
Five special findings’, Molecular Psychiatry 20/1 (2015), pp. 98–
108.
4 The estimates range from 50 per cent down to 33.3 per cent. See
D. Lykken and A. Tellegen, ‘Happiness is a stochastic
phenomenon’, Psychological Science 7/3 (1996), pp. 186–189; J.
H. Stubbe, D. Posthuma et al., ‘Heritability of life satisfaction in
adults: A twin-family study’, Psychological Medicine 35/11
(2005), pp. 1581–1588; M. Bartels et al., ‘Heritability and
genome-wide linkage scan of subjective happiness’, Twin
Research and Human Genetics 13/2, (2010), pp. 135–142; and J.-
E. De Neve et al., ‘Genes, economics, and happiness’, Journal of
Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics 5/4 (2012), pp. 193–
211.
5 See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allen
Lane, 2011).
6 See R. Koestner et al., ‘Attaining personal goals: Self-
concordance plus implementation intentions equals success’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83/1 (2002), pp.
231–244, for a discussion on why the commitment should be both
challenging and attainable.
7 See Heidi Grant-Halvorson, Reinforcements: How to Get People
to Help You (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018)
for a full discussion of studies that cover the psychology of asking
for help, backed up by experimental evidence.
8 See V. K. Bohns, ‘(Mis)understanding our influence over others:
A review of the underestimation-of-compliance effect’, Current
Directions in Psychological Science 25/2 (2016), pp. 119–123.
9 Vanessa Bohns has studied such requests, and her research
illustrates that face-to-face requests for help are more likely to
result in success as compared to email.
10 See D. A. Newark et al., ‘The value of a helping hand: Do help-
seekers accurately predict help quality?’, Academy of
Management Proceedings 2016/1 (2017).
11 See M. M. Roghanizad and V. K. Bohns, ‘Ask in person: You’re
less persuasive than you think over email’, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology 69 (2017), pp. 223–226. They
show that, in general, people underestimate the probability of
success for face-to-face requests, but overestimate the likelihood
of a positive response from an email request.
12 When asking for help, we are essentially giving the other person a
choice. They can say yes or no. Any choice can be framed in a
way that highlights the positive or negative aspects of the same
decision, and framing it in a positive light means a person is more
likely to say yes. For seminal work in this area, see D. Kahneman
and A. Tversky, ‘Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under
risk’, Econometrica 47/2 (1979), pp. 263–291; I. P. Levin et al.,
‘All frames are not created equal: A typology and critical analysis
of framing effects’, Organizational Behavior and Human
Decision Processes 76/2 (1998), pp. 149–188.
13 See Y. Ioannides and L. Loury, ‘Job information networks,
neighborhood effects, and inequality’, Journal of Economic
Literature 42/4 (2004), pp. 1056–1093, for a review of a large
body of evidence which emphasizes evidence of the benefits of
social networks to search for and find jobs. Other convincing
studies that link social networks to labour market outcomes
include P. Bayer et al., ‘Place of work and place of residence:
Informal hiring networks and labor market outcomes’, Journal of
Political Economy 116/6 (2008), pp. 1150–1196; and J.
Hellerstein et al., ‘Neighbors and coworkers: The importance of
residential labor market networks’, Journal of Labor Economics
29/4 (2011), pp. 659–695.

Chapter 3: Time
1 The modh coinníollach is a weird tense in the Irish language,
which relates to affirmative statements in the conditional mood.
It’s used when you’re talking about something that might or
might not occur. For example, ‘If I were a successful author, I
would be very happy.’ The modh coinníollach is still terrorizing
Irish schoolchildren at exam time today.
2 There is an emerging evidence base that links social networking to
poor mental health outcomes. For example, spending too much
time on social networking websites (see K. W. Müller et al., ‘A
hidden type of internet addiction? Intense and addictive use of
social networking sites in adolescents’, Computers in Human
Behavior 55/A (2016), pp. 172–177), and being exposed to
images that suggest that everyone else leads a better life (see H.
G. Chou and N. Edge, ‘“They are happier and having better lives
than I am”: The impact of using Facebook on perceptions of
others’ lives’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
15/2 (2012), pp. 117–121).
3 I would still find it hard to estimate the time-cost of constantly
checking my email even with a minute-by-minute time audit. But
I can say for sure that the endless checking of my emails prevents
me from doing good work – so much so that on the days that I
didn’t intentionally stop checking my email, nothing really got
done.
4 This lack of ping-ponging actually reduced my email flow, as
fellow ping-pongers realized that I was no longer in their club. I
assume they went off to ping-pong with others.
5 The personalization of interventions is still a young topic in
behavioural science, but there is a growing literature that
emphasizes its potential across a growing number of life domains.
For example, personalizing feedback based on a person’s
behaviour and circumstances has been shown to be effective in
cutting down smoking (see J. L. Obermayer et al., ‘College
smoking cessation using cell phone text messaging’, Journal of
American College Health 53/2 (2004), pp. 71–79; and A. L. Stotts
et al., ‘Ultrasound feedback and motivational interviewing
targeting smoking cessation in the second and third trimesters of
 pregnancy’, Nicotine and Tobacco Research 11/8 (2009), pp.
961–968) and managing diabetes (for a study of type 2 diabetics,
see J. H. Cho et al., ‘Mobile communication using a mobile phone
with glucometer for glucose control in Type 2 patients with
diabetes: As effective as an internet based glucose monitoring
system’, Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare 15/2 (2009), pp.
77–82; and for a study for type 1 diabetic patients, see A. Farmer
et al., ‘A real-time, mobile phone-based telemedicine system to
support young adults with type 1 diabetes’, Informatics in
Primary Care 13/3 (2005), pp. 171–178), as well as helping
people lead a more healthy and active lifestyle in general
(examples include a study by F. Buttussi et al., ‘Bringing mobile
guides and fitness activities together: A solution based on an
embodied virtual trainer’, Proceedings of the 8th Conference on
Human-computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
(2006), pp. 29–36; and H. O. Chambliss et al., ‘Computerized
self-monitoring and technology assisted feedback for weight loss
with and without an enhanced behavioural component’, Patient
Education and Counseling 85/3 (2011), pp. 375–382). HMRC
also regularly personalize their letters to ensure that tax is paid on
time (see the 2012 report from the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural
Insights Team, ‘Applying behavioural insights to reduce fraud,
error and debt’).
6 Some great studies exploring the impact of peer effects on
academic outcomes include S. E. Carrell and M. L. Hoekstra,
‘Externalities in the classroom: How children exposed to
domestic violence affect everyone’s kids’, American Economic
Journal: Applied Economics 2/1 (2010), pp. 211–228; S. E.
Carrell et al., ‘Does your cohort matter? Measuring peer effects in
college achievement’, Journal of Labor Economics 27/3 (2009),
pp. 439–464; D. J. Zimmerman, ‘Peer effects in academic
outcomes: Evidence from a natural experiment’, Review of
Economics and Statistics 85/1 (2003), pp. 9–23; and B. Sacerdote,
‘Peer effects with random assignment: Results for Dartmouth
roommates’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 116/2 (2001),
pp. 681–704. There is also evidence to suggest that peer effects
can change other outcomes, such as teaching quality (C. K.
 Jackson and E. Bruegmann, ‘Teaching students and teaching each
other: The importance of peer learning for teachers’, American
Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1/4 (2009), pp. 85–108),
the propensity to commit crime (P. Bayer et al., ‘Building
criminal capital behind bars: Peer effects in juvenile corrections’,
The Quarterly Journal of Economics 124/1 (2009), pp. 105–147)
and the likelihood of smoking weed and drinking alcohol (A. E.
Clark and Y. Lohéac, ‘“It wasn’t me, it was them!” Social
influence in risky behavior by adolescents’, Journal of Health
Economics 26/4 (2007), pp. 763–784).
7 See E. O’Rourke et al., ‘Brain points: A growth mindset incentive
structure boosts persistence in an educational game’, Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings (2014),
pp. 3339–3348.
8 See J. Aronson et al., ‘Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on
African American college students by shaping theories of
intelligence’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38/2
(2002), pp. 113–125; D. Paunesku et al., ‘Mind-set interventions
are a scalable treatment for academic underachievement’,
Psychological Science 26/6 (2015), pp. 784–793; and D. S.
Yeager et al., ‘Using design thinking to improve psychological
interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the
transition to high school’, Journal of Educational Psychology
108/3 (2016), pp. 374–391.
9 See G. L. Cohen et al., ‘Reducing the racial achievement gap: A
social-psychological intervention’, Science 313/5791 (2006), pp.
1307–1310.
10 See J. J. Heckman and T. Kautz, ‘Fostering and measuring skills:
Interventions that improve character and cognition’, (No. 19656)
National Bureau of Economic Research (2013); and D. Almond et
al., ‘Childhood circumstances and adult outcomes: Act II’,
Journal of Economic Literature 56/4 (2018), pp. 1360–1446,
which provides a compelling argument backed by empirical
evidence that soft skills can be changed throughout the life-
course. Notably, the authors also suggest that these are far more
malleable than cognitive skills in later childhood.
11 See G. M. Walton and G. L. Cohen, ‘A brief social-belonging
intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority
students’, Science 331/6023 (2011), pp. 1447–1451, who
leveraged administrative data for ninety-two freshmen students at
a large university campus.
12 See A. C. Cooper et al., ‘Entrepreneurs’ perceived chances for
success’, Journal of Business Venturing 3/2 (1988), pp. 97–108.
13 In 2006, G. P. Latham and E. A. Locke reviewed over forty years
of goal-setting research and concluded that once the person is
committed to their goal, having a specific goal enhances a
person’s performance and also the likelihood of them getting to
where they want to go.
14 See R. Koestner et al., ‘Attaining personal goals’ (2002); and E.
A. Locke and G. P. Latham, ‘Building a practically useful theory
of goal setting and task motivation’, American Psychologist 57/9
(2002), pp. 705–717.
15 See E. A. Locke et al., ‘Separating the effects of goal specificity
from goal level’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes 43/2 (1989), pp. 270–287.
16 For the link to happiness, see Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design:
Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life (London:
Penguin Books, 2014); for the link to motivation, see Emily
Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That
Matters (New York: Crown, 2017). For the link to lower levels of
stress and cynicism see Kim S. Cameron, Positive Leadership
(San Francisco, CA: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2008); D.
Chandler and A. Kapelner, ‘Breaking monotony with meaning:
Motivation in crowdsourcing markets’, Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization 90 (2013), pp.123–133; and B. D.
Rosso et al., ‘On the meaning of work: A theoretical integration
and review’, Research in Organizational Behavior 30/C (2010),
pp. 91–127.
17 This draws on the framework laid out by Cameron in Positive
Leadership (2008).
18 See R. Koestner et al., ‘Attaining personal goals’ (2002), which
highlights that when people see that they are making progress
towards a goal they subsequently perform better.
19 For example, see N. Rothbard and S. Wilk, ‘Waking up on the
right or wrong side of the bed: Start-of-workday mood, work
events, employee affect, and performance’, Academy of
Management Journal 54/5 (2011), pp. 959–980. This study
considers start-of-workday mood and looks to see how it affects
call centre workers. The authors give clear evidence that the
mood of the workers at the start of the day has a significant
influence on performance quality and how the employee engages
with customers. It is worth bearing in mind that your mood
distorts how you see and act in the world. While you cannot
always control your feelings, you can be more sensitive towards
yourself when you are having a bad day.
20 The compromise effect has been well studied in marketing, and
explains purchase decisions pretty well. It implies that if you are
buying anything and are presented with three options, the
majority of people will opt for the mid-priced choice. See, for
example, A. Chernev, ‘Context effects without a context:
Attribute balance as a reason for choice’, Journal of Consumer
Research 32/2 (2005), pp. 213–223; N. Novemsky et al.,
‘Preference fluency in choice’, Journal of Marketing Research
44/3 (2007), pp. 347–356; and U. Khan et al., ‘When trade-offs
matter: The effect of choice construal on context effects’, Journal
of Marketing Research 48/1 (2011), pp. 62–71. If humans tend to
prefer a moderate option when making purchase decisions, what’s
not to say that we don’t also prefer a more moderate option when
allocating our time? Perhaps you have a hidden Goldilocks
persona, and this approach will allow you to hit on a workload
that’s just right!
21 See Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving
Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008); J. Bhattacharya et al., ‘Nudges in
exercise commitment contracts: A randomized trial’, NBER
Working Paper Series 21406 (2015); and K. Volpp et al.,
 ‘Financial incentive-based approaches for weight loss: A
randomized trial’, JAMA 300/22 (2008), pp. 2631–2637.

Chapter 4: Inside
1 Yes, we behavioural scientists do have an answer for everything!
Don’t believe our theory? Well then you must be biased! Handy,
eh?
2 See Scott Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in
the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2017).
3 See R. Stinebrickner and T. R. Stinebrickner, ‘What can be learned
about peer effects using college roommates? Evidence from new
survey data and students from disadvantaged backgrounds’,
Journal of Public Economics 90/8-9 (2006), pp. 1435–1454.
4 See S. Pinchot et el., ‘Are surgical progeny more likely to pursue a
surgical career?’ Journal of Surgical Research 147/2 (2008), pp.
253–259, which illustrates occupational inheritance for medical
doctors; V. Scoppa, ‘Intergenerational transfers of public sector
jobs: A shred of evidence on nepotism’, Public Choice 141/1
(2009), pp. 167–188, which looks at public sector jobs; B.
Feinstein, ‘The dynasty advantage: Family ties in congressional
elections’, Legislative Studies Quarterly 35/4 (2010), pp. 571–
598, which considers positions in US government; and L. Chen et
al., ‘Following (not quite) in your father’s footsteps: Task
followers and labor market outcomes’, MPRA Paper 76041
(2017), which highlights that children choose jobs involving
similar tasks to those their parents do.
5 See R. Brooks et al., ‘Deal or no deal, that is the question: The
impact of increasing stakes and framing effects on decision-
making under risk’, International Review of Finance 9/1-2
(2009), pp. 27–50, and J. Watson and M. McNaughton, ‘Gender
differences in risk aversion and expected retirement benefits’,
Financial Analysts Journal 63/4 (2007), pp. 52–62, for evidence
on gender; C. C. Bertaut, ‘Stockholding behavior of US
households: Evidence from the 1983–1989 Survey of Consumer
 Finances’, Review of Economics and Statistics 80/2 (1998), pp.
263–275, and K. L. Shaw, ‘An empirical analysis of risk aversion
and income growth’, Journal of Labor Economics 14/4 (1996),
pp. 626–653, for evidence on education levels; J. Sung and S.
Hanna, ‘Factors related to risk tolerance’, Journal of Financial
Counseling and Planning 7 (1996), pp. 11–19, and D. A. Brown,
‘Pensions and risk aversion: The influence of race, ethnicity, and
class on investor behavior’, Lewis & Clark Law Review 11/2
(2007), pp. 385–406, for evidence on ethnicity gaps in the US; W.
B. Riley and K. V. Chow, ‘Asset allocation and individual risk
aversion’, Financial Analysts Journal 48/6 (1992), pp. 32–37, and
R. A. Cohn et al., ‘Individual investor risk aversion and
investment portfolio composition’, The Journal of Finance 30/2
(1975), pp. 605–620, for evidence on differences by wealth.
6 See P. Brooks and H. Zank, ‘Loss averse behavior’, Journal of
Risk and Uncertainty 31/3 (2005), pp. 301–325; and U. Schmidt
and S. Traub, ‘An experimental test of loss aversion’, Journal of
Risk and Uncertainty 25/3 (2002), pp. 233–249.
7 See M. Mayo, ‘If humble people make the best leaders, why do
we fall for charismatic narcissists?’ Harvard Business Review (7
April 2018).
8 See John Annett, Feedback and Human Behaviour: The Effects of
Knowledge of Results, Incentives and Reinforcement on Learning
and Performance (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1969) and Albert Bandura, Principles of Behavior Modification
(New York, London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
9 See A. Kluger and A. DeNisi, ‘The effects of feedback
interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-
analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory’,
Psychological Bulletin 119/2 (1996), pp. 254–284. This meta-
analysis combines 607 effect sizes that relate to 23,663
observations in a statistical analysis that examines the effects of
feedback on performance.
10 See V. Tiefenbeck et al., ‘Overcoming salience bias: How real-
time feedback fosters resource conservation’, Management
Science 64/3 (March 2013), pp. 1458–1476, which highlights that
 real time feedback changes energy intensive resource
consumption.
11 See T. Gilovich et al., ‘The spotlight effect in social judgment: An
egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions
and appearance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78/2 (2000), pp. 211–222.
12 For a good discussion on these two biases, see J. Baron and I.
Ritov, ‘Omission bias, individual differences, and normality’,
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 94/2
(2004), pp. 74–85.
13 See, for example, I. M. Davison and A. Feeney, ‘Regret as
autobiographical memory’, Cognitive Psychology 57/4 (2008),
pp. 385–403; T. Gilovich et al., ‘Varieties of regret: A debate and
partial resolution’, Psychological Review 105/3 (1998), pp. 602–
605; and M. Morrison and N. Roese, ‘Regrets of the typical
American: Findings from a nationally representative sample’,
Social Psychological and Personality Science 2/6 (2011), pp.
576–583.
14 See S. Davidai and T. Gilovich, ‘The ideal road not taken: The
self-discrepancies involved in people’s most enduring regrets’,
Emotion 18/3 (2018), pp. 439–452.
15 For an example study, see D. M. Tice et al., ‘Restoring the self:
Positive affect helps improve self-regulation following ego
depletion’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43/3
(2007), pp. 379–384.

Chapter 5: Outside
1 I would choose someone myself, but of course I don’t want to
isolate a specific set of readers.
2 Sadly for them, the £100 was hypothetical!
3 See S. J. Solnick, ‘Gender differences in the ultimatum game’,
Economic Inquiry 39/2 (2001), pp. 189–200; and C. Eckel et al.,
‘Gender and negotiation in the small: Are women (perceived to
be) more cooperative than men?’, Negotiation Journal 24/4
(2008), pp. 429–445.
4 For evidence on age, see D. Neumark at al., ‘Is it harder for older
workers to find jobs? New and improved evidence from a field
experiment’, Journal of Political Economy 127/2 (2019), pp.
922–970; for evidence of gender in England, see P. A. Riach and
J. Rich, ‘An experimental investigation of sexual discrimination
in hiring in the English labor market’, Advances in Economic
Analysis & Policy 5/2 (2006), pp. 1–22; and for evidence on
women of child-bearing age, see S. O. Becker et al.,
‘Discrimination in hiring based on potential and realized fertility:
Evidence from a large-scale field experiment’, Labour Economics
59 (2019), pp. 139–152.
5 In the UK, for every ten male entrepreneurs there are about five
female. In Australia, the US and Canada the ratio is slightly
better, at 10:6. In the UK (see The Alison Rose Review of Female
Entrepreneurship, 2019), only 1 per cent of all venture funding
goes to businesses founded by all-female teams, inhibiting scale-
up (see British Business Bank, Diversity VC, and BVCA, UK VC
& Female Founders report, February 2019).
6 See D. O’Brien et al., ‘Are the creative industries meritocratic? An
analysis of the 2014 British Labour Force Survey’, Cultural
Trends 25/2 (2016), pp. 116–131, which demonstrates that
working-class persons are under-represented in the creative
industries. Also see S. Friedman et al., ‘“Like skydiving without a
parachute”: How class origin shapes occupational trajectories in
British acting’, Sociology 51/5 (2017), pp. 992–1010, which
demonstrates a similar conclusion specific to acting.
7 See J. Miller, ‘Tall poppy syndrome (Canadians have a habit of
cutting their female achievers down)’, Flare 19/4 (1997), pp.
102–106; P. McFedries, ‘Tall poppy syndrome dot-com’, IEEE
Spectrum 39/12 (2002), p. 68; H. Kirwan-Taylor, ‘Are you
suffering from tall poppy syndrome’, Management Today 15
(2006); and J. Kirkwood, ‘Tall poppy syndrome: Implications for
entrepreneurship in New Zealand’, Journal of Management and
Organization 13/4 (2007), pp. 366–382.
8 Research shows that VC-backed start-ups outperform, comparable
to non-VC-backed start-ups. See W. L. Megginson and K. A.
 Weiss, ‘Venture capitalist certification in initial public offerings’,
The Journal of Finance 46/3 (1991), pp. 879–903; and Jeffry A.
Timmons, New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st
Century (Boston, MA: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1999).
9 For a fantastic summary of experimental and observational
research related to groupthink, see Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie,
Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter
(Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).
10 See W. Bruine de Bruin, ‘Save the last dance for me: Unwanted
serial position effects injury evaluations’, Acta Psychologica
118/3 (2005), pp. 245–260, for evidence from figure skating and
the Eurovision song contest; and L. Page and K. Page, ‘Last shall
be first: A field study of biases in sequential performance
evaluation on the Idol series’, Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization 73/2 (2010), pp. 186–198, for evidence from TV
talent contests.
11 For more detailed insights on sequential order contest, see F. B.
Gershberg and A. P. Shimamura, ‘Serial position effects in
implicit and explicit tests of memory’, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20/6 (1994), pp.
1370–1378; and N. Burgess and G. J. Hitch, ‘Memory for serial
order: A network model of the phonological loop and its timing’,
Psychological Review 106/3 (1999), pp. 551–581.
12 W. S. Harvey, ‘Strong or weak ties? British and Indian expatriate
scientists finding jobs in Boston’, Global Networks 8/4 (2008),
pp. 453–473, highlights that British and Indian migrating
scientists had gains from both strong and weak ties in job
searches; D. Z. Levin and R. Cross, ‘The strength of weak ties
you can trust: The mediating role of trust in effective knowledge
transfer’, Management Science 50/11 (2004), pp. 1477–1490,
highlights that both weak ties and strong ties play an independent
role in knowledge transfer within companies; D. W. Brown and
A. M. Konrad, ‘Granovetter was right: The importance of weak
ties to a contemporary job search’, Group and Organization
Management 26/4 (2001), pp. 434–462, illustrates the benefits of
weak ties over strong ties in job search and salary garnered, a
 stylized fact replicated in work by V. Yakubovich, ‘Weak ties,
information, and influence: How workers find jobs in a local
Russian labor market’, American Sociological Review 70/3
(2005), pp. 408–421. T. Elfring and W. Hulsink, ‘Networks in
entrepreneurship: The case of high-technology firms’, Small
Business Economics 21/4 (2003), pp. 409–422, emphasizes the
gains from weak ties for emerging entrepreneurs in technology.
13 If you are interested in this topic there is a fantastic account of
how women have a harder time in economics as compared to
other disciplines. See S. Lundberg and J. Stearns, ‘Women in
economics: Stalled progress’, Journal of Economic Perspectives
33/1 (2019), pp. 3–22.

Chapter 6: Environment
1 The person I know who uses this adage the most is Professor Paul
Dolan from the LSE. In fact, the name of the ‘context matters’
student prize on the executive masters in behavioural science
came about from him saying those two words more than any other
in his teaching. And there is lots of evidence in the behavioural
science literature that illustrates this adage holds weight. For
example, for a discussion on how environments can be used to
change health-related behaviours, see G. J. Hollands et al., ‘The
TIPPME intervention typology for changing environments to
change behavior’, Nature Human Behaviour 1 (2017).
2 See A. North et al., ‘The influence of in-store music on wine
selections’, Journal of Applied Psychology 84/2 (1999), pp. 271–
276.
3 E. M. Altmann et al., ‘Momentary interruptions can derail the train
of thought’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143/1
(2014), pp. 215–226, found that interruptions less than three
seconds long disrupted and caused more errors on sequence-based
cognitive tasks in a lab experiment; G. Carlton and M. A. Blegen,
‘Medication-related errors: A literature review of incidence and
antecedents’, Annual Review of Nursing Research 24/1 (2006),
pp. 19–38, linked interruptions to medication-related errors in
hospitals; A. Mawson, ‘The workplace and its impact on
 productivity’, Advanced Workplace Associates, London 1 (2012),
pp. 1–12, argues that distractions bring individuals out of flow
state.
4 Interruptions have been linked to lower levels of job satisfaction
(for a study of nurses, see B. D. Kirkcaldy and T. Martin, ‘Job
stress and satisfaction among nurses: Individual differences’,
Stress Medicine 16/2 (2000), pp. 77–89), increased levels of
irritability (for a study of call centre agents, see S. Grebner et al.,
‘Working conditions, well-being, and job-related attitudes among
call centre agents’, European Journal of Work and Organizational
Psychology 12(4) (2003), pp. 341–365), and even depression (for
a study of GPs, see study by U. Rout et al., ‘Job stress among
British general practitioners: Predictors of job dissatisfaction and
mental ill-health’, Stress Medicine 12/3 (1996), pp. 155–166).
5 For the link between airflow and productivity, see P. Wargocki et
al., ‘The effects of outdoor air supply rate in an office on
perceived air quality, Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) symptoms
and productivity’, Indoor Air 10/4 (2000), pp. 222–236; and for a
study that links air conditioning to sickness, see P. Preziosi et al.,
‘Workplace air-conditioning and health services attendance
among French middle-aged women: A prospective cohort study’,
International Journal of Epidemiology 33/5 (2004), pp. 1120–
1123.
6 For a study that highlights how indoor plants increase attention
capacity in an office setting, see R. K. Raanaas et al., ‘Benefits of
indoor plants on attention capacity in an office setting’, Journal of
Environmental Psychology 31/1 (2011), pp. 99–105.
7 See M. Münch et al., ‘Effects of prior light exposure on early
evening performance, subjective sleepiness, and hormonal
secretion’, Behavioral Neuroscience 126/1 (2012), pp. 196–203;
S. Joshi, ‘The sick building syndrome’, Indian Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Medicine 12/2 (2008), p. 61;
and V. I. Lohr et al., ‘Interior plants may improve worker
productivity and reduce stress in a windowless environment’,
Journal of Environmental Horticulture 14/2 (1996), pp. 97–100.
8 For a paper that links creativity to dim lighting, see A. Steidle and
L. Werth, ‘Freedom from constraints: Darkness and dim
illumination promote creativity’, Journal of Environmental
Psychology 35 (2013), pp. 67–80; and for a discussion of bright
lights and concentration, see H. Mukae and M. Sato, ‘The effect
of color temperature of lighting sources on the autonomic nervous
functions’, The Annals of Physiological Anthropology 11/5
(1992), pp. 533–538.
9 See L. Lan et al., ‘Neurobehavioral approach for evaluation of
office workers’ productivity: The effects of room temperature’,
Building and Environment 44/8 (2009), pp. 1578–1588; and L.
Lan et al., ‘Effects of thermal discomfort in an office on perceived
air quality, SBS symptoms, physiological responses, and human
performance’, Indoor Air 21/5 (2011), pp. 376–390.
10 See H. Jahncke et al., ‘Open-plan office noise: Cognitive
performance and restoration’, Journal of Environmental
Psychology 31/4 (2011), pp. 373–382.
11 See S. Banbury and D. C. Berry, ‘Disruption of office-related
tasks by speech and office noise’, British Journal of Psychology
89/3 (1998), pp. 499–517.
12 See P. Barrett et al., ‘The impact of classroom design on pupils’
learning: Final results of a holistic, multi-level analysis’, Building
and Environment 89 (2015), pp. 118–133.
13 See studies by A. S. Soldat et al., ‘Color as an environmental
processing cue: External affective cues can directly affect
processing strategy without affecting mood’, Social Cognition
15/1 (1997), pp. 55–71; R. Mehta and R. Zhu, ‘Blue or red?
Exploring the effect of color on cognitive task performances’,
Science 323/5918 (2009), pp. 1226–1229; S. Lehrl et al., ‘Blue
light improves cognitive performance’, Journal of Neural
Transmission 114/4 (2007), pp. 457–460; and Z. O’Connor,
‘Colour psychology and colour therapy: Caveat emptor’, Color
Research & Application 36/3 (2011), pp. 229–234.
14 See Mehta and Zhu, ‘Blue or red?’ (2009), which summarizes
studies on red versus blue.
15 See K. W. Jacobs and J. F. Suess, ‘Effects of four psychological
primary colors on anxiety state’, Perceptual and Motor Skills
41(1) (1975), pp. 207–210. They considered the effects of red,
yellow, green and blue on self- reported measures of anxiety, and
found that higher anxiety scores were correlated with red and
yellow, and conversely blue and green were correlated with lower
scores. See also A. Al-Ayash et al., ‘The influence of color on
student emotion, heart rate, and performance in learning
environments’, Color Research and Application 41/2 (2016),
pp.196–205, which demonstrates that blue increases calmness as
compared to red and yellow.
16 See Al-Ayash et al., ‘The influence of color’ (2016). They
investigated the effects of six colours – vivid red, vivid blue,
vivid yellow, pale red, pale blue and pale yellow – on reading task
performance in students’ private study spaces.

Chapter 7: Resilience
1 See D. Laibson and J. List, ‘Principles of (behavioral) economics’,
American Economic Review 105/5 (2015), pp. 385–390, which
outlines some neat behavioural science factoids as a way to
encourage innovative teaching of the subject in the classroom.
2 A. Killen and A. Macaskill, ‘Using a gratitude intervention to
enhance well-being in older adults’, Journal of Happiness Studies
16/4 (2015), pp. 947–964, makes the link between practising
gratitude and higher levels of self-esteem; F. Gander et al.,
‘Strength-based positive interventions: Further evidence for their
potential in enhancing well-being and alleviating depression’,
Journal of Happiness Studies 14/4 (2013), pp. 1241–1259, makes
the link between gratitude and lower rates of depression; and M.
E. P. Seligman et al., ‘Positive psychology progress: Empirical
validation of interventions’, American Psychologist 60/5 (2005),
pp. 410–421, makes the link between gratitude and higher levels
of happiness.
3 See N. Ashraf et al., ‘Losing prosociality in the quest for talent?
Sorting, selection, and productivity in the delivery of public
services’, LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88175,
 London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library
(2018).
4 My own work with Paul Dolan shows that when it comes to
intergenerational mobility, downward mobility deteriorates life
satisfaction and mental health far more than upward mobility
improves these life domains. We came to these conclusions when
studying the British Cohort study in 1970, a fantastic UK data set
that follows children born in 1970 throughout their lives.
5 See P. Grossman et al., ‘Mindfulness-based stress reduction and
health benefits: A meta-analysis’, Journal of Psychosomatic
Research 57/1 (2004), pp. 35–43, which combines the effects of a
number of studies to illustrate the stress-lowering health benefits
of mindfulness based on stress reduction therapy; and more
recently M. Goyal et al., ‘Meditation programs for psychological
stress and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis’,
JAMA Internal Medicine 174/3 (2014), pp. 357–368. This was a
meta-analysis of forty-seven randomized trials, which highlights
moderate evidence of improvements in anxiety, depression and
pain but no effect on mood, attention, substance use, eating
behviour, sleep quality or weight.
6 G. Bonanno, ‘Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we
underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely
aversive events?’, American Psychologist 59/1 (2004), pp. 20–28,
emphasizes hardiness as a pathway to resilience; S. Maddi, ‘The
story of hardiness: Twenty years of theorizing, research, and
practice’, Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research
54/3 (2002), pp. 173–185, shows hardiness enhances resilience in
the face of everyday stressors and demands; M. E. P. Seligman,
‘Building resilience’, Harvard Business Review 89/4 (2011), pp.
100–106, highlights enhancing mental toughness as a way to
increase resilience.
7 See B. Smith et al., ‘The brief resilience scale: Assessing the
ability to bounce back’, International Journal of Behavioral
Medicine 15/3 (2008), pp. 194–200, which illustrates that
resilience is positively correlated with social relations, physical
health and mental health; Q. Gu and C. Day, ‘Teachers’
resilience: A necessary condition for effectiveness’, Teaching and
Teacher Education 23/8 (2007), pp. 1302–1316, for evidence that
resilience makes teachers more motivated and committed; L.
Abramson et al., ‘Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and
reformulation’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 87/1 (1978), pp.
49–74, which emphasizes that innovative thinking and resilience
are correlated for college students.
 Bibliography
Books
Annett, John, Feedback and Human Behaviour: The Effects of Knowledge
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