Entry 1807

On the value of five minutes, slow and steady madness, thinking like a scientist and the irony of humour

5 Minutes

Because thinking is a lot of work, Alan suggests we only need 5 minutes to think about what someone has said before responding. Alan is right because sometimes we enter refutation mode and fail to really listen. I also think failing to listen may be warped by the desirability bias—people hearing only what they want to hear.

Truthfully, maybe we don’t need up to 5 minutes because it may seem awkward but you get the point now.

Slow and Steady

The days are bleeding into each other but the only thing that won’t go away is this headache. It’s almost as if I’ll never be rid of this internal battle.

I don’t believe I was born burdened but maybe over the years my voice thinned out from trying to express myself. My raspy, thick, somewhat stentorian voice, which would often turn heads and raise brows with questions like ‘why do you sound like a man?’ disappeared slowly, like my enthusiasm to express myself.

It was only then that I started to think about my thoughts, like an observer and then I started to run mad slowly. Slow and steady.

A Scientist

Adam Grant said it is easy to slip into the mindset of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors and politicians.

As a preacher, we promote our ideals and protect them by delivering sermons. As a prosecutor, we recognise flaws in people’s thinking and we argue to prove them wrong and win our case. As politicians, we want to win an audience so we lobby for their approval.

The risk of being so wrapped up in being one of these mindsets is why we don’t ever pause to rethink our views. The right mental tool is being actively open-minded, not just open-minded, doubting what you know, being curious about what you don’t know and updating your views based on new data.

The right mindset of the profession to slip into is to think like a scientist. God, I really like Adam Grant.

Job 22:21

A two-minute video clip on Pastor Poju preaching about acquainting oneself with the Lord is playing for the tenth time. I can almost say it off-hand now.

There’s something about that video clip that draws me in as if it is reminding me to be present. It’s the same way Earl Nightingale’s videos draw me in, like an intimate invitation to be limitless, to run without holding anything back. It’s a beautiful feeling.

Humour

Life is full of ironies. One of them is reading the first few pages about the psychology of humour and feeling sleepy.

You have no idea but once they start dissecting humour and its origin, contexts and many forms, the humour evaporates immediately. It gets even worse when they start the debate whether or not there is a technical term to denote the particular emotion humour brings.

Apparently, most terms like amusement seem cognitive and do not fully capture the emotional nature only for them to later settle on ‘mirth’ (after all the back and forth you would imagine a more impressive term would be used) and even that is decoded as a distinctive emotion because of its psychological and experiential components.

Maybe this is why they eventually focused on laughter because it’s the obvious behaviour we can largely attach to humour. Oh well.