Accomplishments are usually only achieved when a number of factors all come together. Take, for example, a tennis player. It is unlikely that he will accomplish a lot if he doesn't have ambitious goals. If he only plays for fun, or to be the best player in his tennis club, it is very unlikely he'll put in sufficient effort to win a major tournament. So ambition will be an important ingredient in d...

One of the most mutually beneficial states that two people can achieve is symbiogenesis, where they take such pleasure in each other's happiness (and displeasure in each other's unhappiness) that they start viewing each other's interests almost as their own. The more strongly this happens, the closer the pair is to being a single, two bodied organism, working towards a common set of goals. One ...

One of the big challenges to self-improvement is getting yourself to try a new strategy instead of the same thing over and over again. If you already experimented with calorie counting diets four times, only to gain the weight back after a few months, you'll be very likely to gain the weight back again next time you try this type of diet. If you tried to get yourself to exercise by buying a monthl...

By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we ...

If you try to enumerate all of the things that you know with absolute, 100% certainty, you will find that the list is very small. You know that “something” exists. If you have mental experiences, then you know that “you” exist (though coming up with a reasonable definition for what “you” means can be remarkably tricky). If your mental experiences are varied, then you know that whatever exi...

For those who are interested in finding someone to date, a little probabilistic thinking can help a lot. To see how, let's take a moment to analyze the situation. Every time that you meet a new person, there is some chance that you will end up in a romantic relationship. If we want to assign a probability to this happening in any particular case, that probability will depend on the information ...

When we try to predict how long a task will take, we are in danger of falling prey to the planning fallacy. This is the natural human tendency to underestimate how long your own projects will take and the costs involved. To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, ...

Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like "nonplused", "loquacious" and "limerance" spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don't consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books o...

Should I wait in line to get this free mug? Should I walk to dinner rather than taking a taxi? Should I drive an extra fifteen minutes to go to the cheaper grocery store? Should I keep reading reviews for another twenty minutes to make sure I've really found the best hot water bottle that $10 can buy? These questions can be quite difficult to answer without a framework for valuing our time, especi...

If you hire a law firm, as an individual or the owner of a small business, there is a pretty good chance they will bill you by the hour. So if the work performed takes 100 hours rather than 50, you will pay them twice as much. From the law firm’s perspective, this is reasonable, because each one of their work hours is about as valuable to them as every other one (holding the specific employees on ...