Category: Life lessons — 218
A Request, an Order and the Right to Refuse
Do not issue an instruction nobody intends to carry out. Every such order reduces the weight of the next one. The system learns fast: a formal demand can be ignored…
Fact and the Novel in Your Head
Words have a literal sense and a function. The philosopher of language Paul Grice noticed that conversation works thanks to unspoken cooperation. We assume that the other person is telling…
The Body Is Not Transport for the Head
Intellectual culture is used to talking about thinking as if the body merely delivered consciousness to the desk. In fact sleep, movement, pain, food and hormonal state take part in…
Asking After Your Own Attempt
A culture of self-reliance easily turns a request for help into an admission of incompetence. As a result, people spend weeks solving something a specialist would explain in five minutes,…
Listening Without Bookkeeping
Communication advice often turns listening into a technology of influence: find out more than you told, and the other person will consider you pleasant. A conversation, however, is not obliged…
A Slow Fire
Gradual change is hard to notice. We adapt quickly to a smell, to noise, to rising expenses, to a deteriorating relationship and to daily fatigue. Each separate step is too…
Bad Weather Without Promises
The social ritual of consolation requires promising that a hard period will soon be over and everything is bound to work out. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it passes a wish…
Uneven Distribution of Benefit
In many systems a small share of the causes produces a large share of the result. Some clients bring in most of the revenue. A few defects cause the bulk…
The Cost of a Question
The school stereotype divides questions into clever and stupid, and people into those who understood at once and those who made fools of themselves. In practice the quality of a…
Responsibility Without Omnipotence
The culture of personal effectiveness is happy to tell you that the result depends on you alone. The idea gives a sense of control — and quietly credits a person…
Good enough
Professional morality often confuses quality with maximum quality. But work is good not when everything possible has been put into it, but when it reliably meets the requirements at a…
Participation Without Worship
Political conversation often demands a choice between believing in an institution and rejecting it entirely. But a system can be used, criticised and changed without turning either participation or cynicism…
A system is not a person
Public problems are conveniently explained by defective people: the poor are lazy, officials are corrupt, the boss is bad, voters are stupid. Personal qualities matter, but the system determines which…
Fear, Risk and the Exit
The popular image of courage requires you not to be afraid. But fear is a threat-detection system, not a moral defect; the trouble starts when it is given an unconditional…
The Next Step Knows About the Last
Care does not start with moving slowly. It starts with understanding the chain. Before acting it helps to picture: what will happen immediately afterwards; which options it will close off;…
The Idea and the Reality
A cynical culture declares every big idea a cover for interests; an ideological one demands that the idea be preferred to its living consequences. Both approaches exempt a favourite picture…
Death That Is Never Lived Through
Your own death can’t be lived through as a completed state. As long as the experience exists, so does the one having it. This old philosophical observation sometimes reduces the…
Process and Result
“Worked on the report” and “finished the report” describe different results. Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the famous pin factory. One worker doing the whole process produced…
Work Is Part of a Contract
Corporate culture talks readily about family, mission and a shared destiny when the organisation needs more time and loyalty. But a company buys a person’s work, not the whole person.…
Help with a Calculator
Public morality offers a choice between a warm heart and cold calculation. But help without an understanding of the consequences can sustain harm, and calculation alone, without sympathy, easily forgets…