“We gotta keep our composure!” -Will Ferrell (aka "Frank the Tank"), Old School
I never tell someone I am busy.
Let me put it another way.
I hate the word “busy” and roll my eyes when anyone tells me how busy they are, how they could not do X because of how busy they’ve been, or try to explain their entire life by saying things are really busy.
Are any of these people right when they are “busy”?
I have no idea. And I’m not sure it matters for two reasons:
Ego: I secretly judge people who liberally use the word busy, telling myself I am busier than they are (yet somehow manage to be more productive without whining about it.)
Skepticism: Someone who constantly complains about how busy they are is wearing busyness as a purple heart and badge of honor to try and impress me (spoiler: as Rogert Martin says, your personal strategy sucks.1)
If this seems like an over-interpretation, you haven’t read enough previous issues. If I didn’t over-interpret, there would be no Moneyball Judaism.
In a vacuum, “busyness” should be measured objectively. However, my reaction to someone telling me they are busy is one example of my emotions immediately affecting my judgment about others.
I may think rationality is driving the bus, but it’s just along for a bumpy ride.
Affect Heuristic
Which comes first, emotions or rationality?
To put it another way, let’s say that we all agree that facts and emotions play a role in decision-making. However, this presents two possibilities :
We start thinking rationally but let emotions pollute our thought process.
We start thinking emotionally but must bring rationality into the picture.
This distinction is anything but trivial and can feel like a chicken-and-egg problem (now you understand the picture.) As someone who loves this subject, even after years of learning, I still assumed that rationality was my starting point and I needed tools to avoid polluting my mind.
Surprise Suprise: I was mostly wrong. Meet the “affect heuristic.”
R.B. Zajonc argues, “There are…very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component.”2 At first glance, this seems obvious; everyone recognizes a moment in a decision-making process when emotions start to take control.
However, Zajonc argues that while most psychological theories assume that “preferences are formed and expressed only after and only as a result of considerable prior cognitive activity,” Zajonc contends that “affect is always present as a companion to thought, whereas the converse is not true for cognition.”3 We start most decision-making processes from an emotional place and only later bring cognition into the picture. This is one of several reasons we are prone to seek information confirming our first instincts; if emotions drive the bus, emotions get to pick what facts come along for the ride.
Decades later, Paul Slovic and a group of researchers build upon Zajonc’s work and coin the term “affect heuristic,” arguing that “representations of objects and events in people’s minds are tagged to varying degrees with affect…[serving] as a cue for many important judgments.”4 When I hear someone liberally throwing out how busy they are, I am not in any position to objectively judge whether or not they are right because I am simply tacking on my emotional analysis of their statement.
As a result, I’m torn about how I think about this heuristic.
On the one hand, regular readers of this newsletter know that I often bemoan how the Jewish organizational world makes little effort to reach some objective set of standards to determine what “works” and what does “not” and that we are far more impacted by cognitive biases that we want to believe. However, if Zajonc, Slovic, and others are right, one might worry that we avoid trying to make rational decisions because we’ve decided it’s impossible.
Let me introduce you to this week’s book recommendation to avoid that fatalism.
Clear Thinking
“Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.”5
I love this quote from the opening of Shane Parrish’s new book Clear Thinking. Parrish hosts a popular podcast called The Knowledge Project, where he speaks to others to “master what other people have figured out”:
Clear Thinking is Parrish’s first attempt to crystalize the lessons he brings to his audience into a coherent approach to better thinking in our lives. True to the affect heuristic, Parrish wants us to realize that we will not learn to think better by simply yelling to ourselves, “THINK CLEARLY.” That approach will work out as well as Will Ferrell telling his fraternity brothers in Old School to keep their composure.6
Parrish knows that emotions are always involved in making judgments and that trying to rid ourselves of their impact is impossible. As a result, a better approach is to “train ourselves to identify the moments when judgment is called for…and pause to think clearly.”7 Consider the following hypothetical:
You have a well-meaning but disorganized boss who is always behind. This means that you are always behind no matter how hard you work.
Heavily overworked, you find yourself overwhelmed with meetings and menial tasks to the point where you cannot make the time to do the work for which you will be held accountable.
You miss an important deadline one day, and this boss reads you to the riot act. In response, you compose a long but respectful email to your boss outlining all the things you had to endure over the week to prove to your point how right you are about your packed schedule.
In this situation, would you say that you are acting rationally?
From the outside, it appears clear that this person is not acting rationally; after all, who thinks their boss will care about a long list of “facts” when your goal is to prove that they are wrong? However, most of us can think of at least one time when we tried this approach because we honestly believed it was the “rational” way to approach the issue.
I know I have.
This example is one of many Parrish provides about where we know that thinking and judgment are required, yet what might seem to be the rational response is one filled with emotion. Instead, Parrish encourages us to “bypass” many individual choices and “create an automatic behavior rule that requires no decision-making at the moment.”8
This is why I consider “busy” a four-letter word of the worst kind. It’s not that my claim of being busy is false; it’s just that no one else cares how busy I am other than me (and perhaps my family.) Various options exist to perform well with many responsibilities or to manage one’s time better so that one does not need to make claims of busyness. The only question is whether I will think enough to remember that the next time I do not meet someone’s expectations.
The Daily Stoic
14
The number of Emmys won by RuPaul, the most decorated competition host and most decorated person of color in the Emmys' history.
Read more in Ronan Farrow’s profile of RuPaul in The New Yorker.
What I Read This Week
AI and Ozempic: Scott Galloway wrote an amazing essay comparing the popularity of Ozempic as a weight-loss drug with how artificial intelligence will impact our organizations.
Do You Think Proportionally?: Katy Milkman responded to my LinkedIn comment! That’s totally going on my resume. In the meantime, read this.
The Case for Being Less Serious: Do you take your work too seriously? Great, you’ve come to the right place. We've got t-shirts.
A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand: The Jewish world went through a period when “branding” was referenced way too much (and treated as a magic elixir.) That doesn’t mean branding does not exist or that we do not need to take time to cultivate it. Read more.
Understanding Spatial Computing and the Metaverse: Do these words confuse you? They confuse me, too. I found this article rich in content.
Ibid., 154.
Now the video makes sense (I think?)
Shane Parrish, 6.
Ibid., 103.