You’re Not Staying Because It’s Good — You’ve Already Paid
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? […]
Your Beliefs Won’t Change Until Your Purpose Gets Big Enough
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 Isn’t Yours to Carry
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 […]
The Arrival Fallacy — Getting There Won’t Fix You
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 […]
The Failures Won’t Haunt You — The Hesitations Will
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 […]
Stop Trying to Bounce Back — You’re Built for Better Than That
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, […]
Stop Fighting Yourself, Start Rigging the Room — Choice Architecture and the Cookie Fiasco
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 […]
The Lindy Effect — The Newest Advice You’re Consuming Is the Least Likely to Be True
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 […]
The Mundanity of Excellence — There Is No Secret, and That’s the Best News You’ll Get Today
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 […]
The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad — Why Tolerable Is More Dangerous Than Terrible
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. […]