You’re not staying because it’s good. You’re staying because you’ve already paid. The sunk cost fallacy is the very human inability to walk away from what we’ve already invested — money, years, energy, identity. We focus on the size of the loss instead of the only question that matters: what is the next dollar worth?...
You will change your beliefs only when you have a big enough purpose. People assume changing a deep belief takes decades of therapy, journaling and self-exploration. What I’ve seen in years of coaching is that beliefs move fastest under leverage — when you link the negative belief to the non-attainment of something you deeply want....
Most of your stress comes from trying to run a department you were never given. Epictetus — born a slave, became the most sought-after teacher in the Roman Empire — built his entire system on one sorting question: is this in my control or not? Your judgments, your effort, your responses: yours. Outcomes, other people’s...
You think you’ll be happy when you arrive. I’ve arrived at a few places — let me save you the trip. Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar named it the arrival fallacy: the belief that reaching the goal — the number, the title, the finish line — will deliver lasting fulfilment. It doesn’t, and the mechanism is hedonic...
ou will regret almost none of your failures. You will regret nearly all of your hesitations. That’s not a motivational slogan — it’s what the research shows. Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich found that over a lifetime, regrets of inaction outnumber regrets of action roughly two to one, and the gap widens as we age. In...
ou’re not fragile. You’re probably not even just resilient. Today I want to show you a third category most people have never heard of — and why it changes how you see every hard thing in your life. Fragile things break under stress. Resilient things return to their original shape. But antifragile systems — muscle,...
You don’t have weak willpower — you have a strong environment pointed at the wrong things. Jonathan Doyle on choice architecture research: behaviour follows environment far more than intention. Including the full confession of the cookie fiasco (one daughter, one car, one half-eaten cookie that stared at him all the way home), why willpower is...
Have you heard of the Lindy effect? Taleb’s principle that age predicts future life: the longer an idea has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep working. Jonathan Doyle takes it from ancient Babylon to the Instagram feed — why brains that took 4 million years to build now drink from a firehose of “latest...
What if talent is the myth that’s letting you off the hook? Jonathan Doyle on Daniel Chambliss’s famous study of elite Olympic swimmers — years embedded with the best in the world, searching for the talent magic and finding none. What he found instead: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills...
A truly terrible job might save your life — but a tolerable one can steal it. Jonathan Doyle on Harvard professor Dan Gilbert’s research into “the peculiar longevity of things not so bad”: we escape awful situations fast, but stay stuck in mildly bad ones for decades, because they never hurt enough to trigger change....