Paint Your Nails, Change Your Habits

Here’s the thing about habits and rituals: They are enormously evolutionarily advantageous. We are cognitive misers; making decisions and remembering things take energy (which is finite), and forgetting things can be very costly–even deadly. So, we’re primed to form habits, because they offload this effort. The productivity books and blogs are full of anecdotes about Famous Admirable People establishing rituals to free up their headspace (e.g., Einstein had a closet full of clothes that all matched and never wore socks; he could just dress at random without putting effort into choosing garments).

Any task that you can initiate in under two seconds[1] is not perceived as requiring effort; it easily slips into habit and automation: Putting on a seat belt, switching off a light, grabbing some M&Ms from a bowl on someone’s desk, glancing at a cellphone.[2]

As this little list makes obvious, there are up and downsides to this mechanism, as an unhealthy or downright dangerous habit can form and ossify just as easily as a good one.

So, I love that this guy’s nail-polish hack–by creating a consistent distraction–effectively increases the cognitive effort of the habit up beyond the threshold, so the automation falls. Maintain this consistent cognitive load, and the habit softens up and becomes far more susceptible to modification.

Red Thumb Reminder – YouTube

Continue reading “Paint Your Nails, Change Your Habits”

“Any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did.” @kohenari

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. My February column (which came in so late it actually ran in March) is a sorta interview I did with Ari Kohen (Schlesinger Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Nebraska, author of books, human rights activist, researcher generally known for his work on heroism/moral decision making, basically solid dude, and chum of mine from auld lang syne).
Although Woody Allen’s alleged 1992 rape of his seven-year-old adopted daughter is the inciting incident for that conversation, the column itself is *not* about Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, rape, fame, patriarchy, or the law.
It *is* about how we should think about our interactions with those who transgression, and the pitifalls of the psychological standards we use to decide when (or if) we’ll accept a transgressor back into our midsts. Quoth Kohen:

I consistently tell people, when I talk about the death penalty and people on death row, is that it’s troubling to judge someone by the worst thing he ever did, and say “This is the measure of the man.” This is a point I got long ago from Sister Helen Prejean, she says it all the time, that any one of us would hate to be thought of as the worst thing we ever did. I think there’s some merit to that. I think most people want to draw a line and say “Well, not when it comes to murder; murderers are murderers and that is the most relevant fact about them,” and they’d make the same case about child rapists, or pedophiles, whatever; that’s what you are.
But I try – and it’s stressful – but I try not to think of people that way, not to think of people as monstrous, and not to think about people as being that worst thing, but as having made terrible decisions and having made atrocious mistakes, or having acted on terrible impulses. It’s difficult, and it’s one of the hardest things to talk to people about when you talk about criminals and people in prison. [. . . ] Because, generally, free people think of themselves as being very, very different from [criminals and] incarcerated people, that there’s a fundamental break between someone who is in prison and someone who is not in prison. [. . .] The idea that they could, or that someone they love could be, in prison is a shocking idea, because they are categorically different. . . .

Much more here: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Crimes and Misdemeanors

Check out “Haphead”—a noir-ish near-future SF web series #scifi

  • Haphead (HAP-hed): noun An individual who has learned lethal skills by playing next-gen fully immersive video games. Associated with emotional instability, poor impulse control, and violent public outbursts.

    This Buffyesque web-series is the latest project from the folks who brought you the mockumentary Ghosts with Shit Jobs. If you dig the trailer, please take a second to “Like” it on YouTube, Facebook, G+, etc., or sign up for their newsletter; the more public support they can show for this project, the more likely the Canadian government will bankroll the series. Go Canada!

    • Anti-Smoking Ad Campaigns: Vitamins vs. Painkillers #biz #marketing #rhetoric

    Conventional wisdom in advertising is that it’s much easier to sell painkillers than it is to sell vitamins–i.e., it’s easier to motivate a suffering prospect with the offer of relief than it is to motivate a basically content prospect with an offer of future betterment. This is especially the case with men, who basically *never* believe anything bad will happen to them–or if they do, simply brush it of with cavalier bluster (“Why stop smoking? Sure, it shortens your life, but it only takes the worst years, amiright?”–which I’ve heard countless times, evidently from men you *haven’t* watched their spouses’ beloved grandfathers slowly suffocate in hospice, smothered by lungs gone brittle with a lifetime of Luckies.)
    So, for example, insurance was a really hard product to sell in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s–until it dawned on folks not to focus on the prospect, but instead on his family. Tell a man about how his *family* will suffer when he’s gone, and you give him pain in the here and now that will be soothed by purchasing an insurance policy[*]–i.e., you convert vitamins into painkillers.
    The genius of this ad is that shifts the vague notion of future pain caused by smoking cigarettes into an immediate discomfort and moral panic. Well played Thai Health Promotion Foundation (those with an interest in marketing–and MAD MEN fans–will note that the ad was produced by Ogilvy & Mather).

    Continue reading “Anti-Smoking Ad Campaigns: Vitamins vs. Painkillers #biz #marketing #rhetoric”

    Be the Ant on the Rubber Rope #writing #biz #everythingelse

    Consider for a moment the plight of the ant on a rubber rope:

    An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch by 1 km per second (both in front of and behind the ant, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc). Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?

    The answer–which may seem counterintuitive–is yes, although “in the form stated above the time taken is colossal.”
    If I were to write an essay on this, it would be one on incremental progress: No matter how distant your goal, no matter how small your steps, no matter how vexing the hinderance—even to the point of your destination actively moving away from you—you will get there provided you don’t flag and don’t quit.
    But I don’t need to write an essay, because the situation is self-instructive, once you see it for what it is. Instead, I offer this very brief benediction:
    Yes, the road is long, my children, and the universe is fucking with you. But you, my best belovéds, are each a dogged little ant: Just keep trucking, and you will walk that mutherfucker down. Amen.

    Astronaut Ronald McNair: Libraries, Cops, Star Trek, and Social Justice


    What I’ve long admired about Ronald McNair was how polite and persistent he was in telling the haters (both abstract and concrete, external and internal) to fuck off. Just an affable, erudite guy going about his business, taking a moment to say: “Hey, America; couldn’t help but notice the arc of your history was a little crooked. I’m just gonna bend it back towards justice a smidge, if you don’t mind.”

    Tl;dr: Facebook is a Marketing Vanity Press #biz

    The basic problem is this: Facebook tolerates fraudulent click-farm “Likes” because, under Facebook’s ever-evolving timeline algorithms, an *increasing* number of disengaged “fans” *decreases* the visibility of your Page. The only way to recover is to buy more ads from Facebook.
    The analogy to vanity publishing isn’t the implicit perpetual up-sell–although that is at play here, and annoys the crap out of me. What’s bothersome about doing business with Facebook (as I discovered in my only business interaction with them) is that Facebook–like Google, and basically every large corporation out there–forces the little guy to eat all the risk.
    Risk is expensive stuff, but it’s hard to see that expense, so it’s easy for regular humans, living on the regular human timeline, to miss it. The Big Trick that Fat Cats use to get fat is forcing someone else (and generally lots of someones small) to eat the risk.
    ▶ Facebook Fraud – YouTube

    RECOMMENDED VIEWING: Talking Funny with Chris Rock, Louis CK, Ricky Gervais, & Seinfeld #craft #biz #writing

    I’m not a huge fan of any of these comics–I like Chris Rock and some Louis CK, am sort of impartial to Ricky Gervais, and have grudgingly grown to respect Seinfeld as an artist, although I was never very into his show–but I *love* listening to accomplished craftsmen discuss craft. Hell, this documentary could be “Talking Toilets,” and feature four highly accomplished old plumbers who really respect each other’s work and love each other’s company, and I would love it *exactly* as much at this.
    That said, since these four craftsman are “creatives” (*shudder*), what they have to say is both interesting *and* useful to me. If you are a creative craftsperson of any stripe–a writer, a marketer, a speaker, a printmaker–this will be an hour well spent.