Monthly Mulling💡
Lights, Camera, Lather: Kodak's Blunder, Two-Day Rule, & Shower Thoughts
Hi👋 Tapan here.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
Before we start, as always, here are the updates:
✍🏼 New articles on the blog:
📸 The Power of Confirmation Bias: How it Influenced Kodak’s Fall and Impacts Our Decision-Making
🛳️ Warren Buffett’s Noah Rule: Taking Action to Conquer Procrastination
📖 Currently, I am reading: $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi
This book will change your perspective on product pricing. I had quite a few ‘aha’ moments while reading this book. If you are an entrepreneur, solopreneur, publish content online, or are just curious about the creator economy - read this book!
📸 A Not-So-Picture-Perfect Tale: Kodak & Confirmation Bias
Founded in 1888, Kodak was a household name, and its products adorned shelves worldwide. But the dawn of the digital age soon turned Kodak’s world upside down.
Kodak's leadership, blinded by their undying devotion to film cameras, treated digital technology like a passing fad. The result? A series of blunders that left them in the dust:
📉 Firstly, they underinvested in digital technology, believing that their film business would continue to thrive indefinitely.
🙅♂️ Secondly, they delayed the launch of digital cameras, allowing competitors like Canon and Nikon to capture the emerging market.
🤳🏽 Finally, Kodak failed to recognize the growing importance of online photo sharing. Eventually, missing out on the opportunity to dominate this new space.
As the years went by, Kodak’s market share dwindled, and the once-mighty empire began to crumble. The company’s refusal to adapt to the changing landscape finally caught up with them, leading to its bankruptcy in 2012 (📉).
So, what blinded Kodak’s leadership to the revolutionary changes happening in their own industry? The answer lies in the powerful cognitive trap known as confirmation bias.
And, what exactly is Confirmation Bias?
🧠 Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon where people unconsciously favour information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.
Our brains seek consistency and avoid discomfort from conflicting beliefs, and values.
As a result, we tend to unconsciously cherry-pick information that aligns with our current views while discarding anything that challenges them.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
- Richard Feynman, Speech on Cargo Cult Science
We all have seen confirmation bias in our lives:
📰 Choosing News Sources: We gravitate towards outlets, sites, or social media groups that echo our political beliefs, values, or opinions.
👫 Friendships and Social Circles: We surround ourselves with like-minded folks, which solidifies our beliefs and makes it tough for anyone to challenge them.
😍 Love & Relationships: Confirmation bias can have us clutching onto our partner's idealized image, even in the face of evidence that contradicts our perceptions. Talk about rose-coloured glasses!
📱 Social Media & Filter Bubbles: Algorithms keep us hooked by showing content that aligns with our preferences. This filter bubble intensifies confirmation bias, as we're fed a constant stream of belief-reinforcing info, entrenching our views even deeper.
💡 So, what can you do about confirmation bias?
🤔 Embrace Critical Thinking: Challenge your own beliefs by asking questions such as “Why am I wrong?” and “What’s the exact opposite of my belief and why does it make sense?”.
🫧 Seek Diverse Perspectives: Deliberately search for competing ideas from a wide range of sources.
👂 Practice Active Listening: When engaging in conversations or debates, genuinely listen to the other person’s perspective. Avoid immediately trying to refute their arguments.
I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.
- Charlie Munger
🗓️ No Skipping Allowed: The Two-Day Rule
🧠 The Two-Day Rule is a simple approach to maintaining progress in any area of your life: Don't allow yourself to take a break for more than one day in a row.
If you want to start reading, you can’t skip more than one day. If it’s working out, you have to go to the gym every alternate day. At minimum.
You don’t skip on your goal for two days in a row.
I was introduced to the Two Day Rule by Matt D’Avella and in fact, it’s one of the reasons I started reading consistently.
🛀🏽 From Soap to Solutions: Shower Thoughts and the Two Modes of Thinking
There are two modes of thinking: focus and diffuse.
The focus mode🧐 is all about active concentration, while the diffuse mode🧘🏽♂️ is a passive, relaxed state where the mind can wander and make new connections.
To unleash creativity and solve problems, it's essential to oscillate between these modes.
Constant input, including doom-scrolling on social media, keeps you in the focus mode and can interfere with entering the diffuse mode, putting a damper on creativity and problem-solving.
Now, can you guess which everyday activity is routine, relaxing, requires minimal mental energy, triggers dopamine release, and keeps distractions at bay? Yup, it's taking a shower 🚿!
💡 Plan your day so you have focus mode and these micro-breaks to enter the diffuse mode of thinking: shower, take a walk, meditate, nap, use the Pomodoro technique, or just sit and let your thoughts wander.
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