Hard choices: Easy life - Easy Choices: Hard life

I mentioned Farnamstreet Blog and The Knowledge Project Podcast - both by Shane Parnish - a couple of times as two of my favorite sources on thinking about thinking. In one of my favorite interviews on the podcasts, the one with Angelist.co founder Naval Ravikant, Naval makes the case for always sticking to daily habits that are about improving your own mental and physical health. If you do this, all the other important areas in your life will benefit greatly from this. I just love the quote he used to summarize this: 

Hard choices: Easy life. Easy Choices: hard life. 

And I would add to this: Happiness is a direct consequence of hard choices. This relates to the work of Sigmund Freud on the nature of desire. Freud struggled his whole scientific career with the paradox of desire: The problem with desire is that nothing is more killing for your joy and excitement than the fulfillment of a desire. The moment you get what you want, it looses most of its attractiveness. Freud discovered that the biggest source of enjoyment lays in desire itself. For example: when you're in the first weeks of a new relationship, everything's exciting and unknown and difficult. And this fuels your desire like a rocket engine. 

I had to think about Freud's observation on the nature of desire, when I read this beautiful quote that Shane Parnish highlighted in this weeks episode of his newsletter. It's from a New York Times article entitled "How Plato foresaw Facebook's Folly": 

"But the deeper reason that technology so often disappoints and betrays us is that it promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard.Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of many years is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — and staying in it — is hard."

What a great quote to ponder on. Isn't it a profound truth that all the things that make life interesting and worth living, are the things that require practice, dedication, barriers and challenges?
 

The design of the platform shapes the behaviours of its users  

Overheard in a recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show podcast in which he interviews Cal Newport, author of Deep Work for the second time:  

There's an interesting difference between Blogs and Twitter. In the blogosphere, your reputation grows gradually. The reason for this is the power of the hyperlink. Your reputation travels with the speed of other blogs back-linking to your blog and it grew in proportion to the social status of the people that referred to your blog as an interesting source. It didn't matter that much that people didn't agree with you, since most disagreement had to be articulated very thoughtful. 

Social Media, by contrast, triggers herding behaviour. If you want to be seen, you need to craft your Tweet in such a way that it triggers sentiment and outrage. A tweet can generate a massive crowd of car crash spectators, simply because the tweet allows people to signal to their followers in which camp they are. Your reputation is not that much connected to the intelligence of your contribution, but the degree to which you are skilled at behavioural engineering of attention and emotion. 

Meanwhile at SUE...

So much exciting stuff is going on at SUE. The open edition from the Behavioural Design Academy masterclass sold out for the fifth time in a row, with more and more people flying in from all over the world. This month we'll be doing sprints and in-company trainings in The Netherlands, Denmark, USA and Belgium. We're currently working on designing financial behavior, citizen behaviour, employee behaviour, voting behaviour, recruitment behaviour, donation behaviour and shopper behaviour and are working for UNHCR, Heineken, ABN Amro, VVD, KBC Bank, City of Amsterdam, eBay Classifieds Group, Randstad, ANWB,  Friesland Campina, Stichting Aap and the Dutch home care network Beweging3.0, just to name a few.
 

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