Damon D'Amore

* Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions: “Being influenced by the actions of people who are playing a different game than you are.”

* How To Practice Long-Term Thinking When You Can Barely See Past Tomorrow: “While the future is certain, you can still create it by what you choose to do or fail to do.”

* Survivorship Bias: “While optimism can actually be helpful, inflating our likelihood of success because we forget to include failures in our dataset will add unnecessary risk to an already complex decision-making process.”

* David Foster Wallace On The Meaning Of Life (Audio): “2005 commencement speech which was the basis for his book on the same subject.”

* The Healthy Emotion We Don’t Get Enough Of: “Awe is partly about focusing on the world outside of your head and rediscovering that it is filled with marvelous things that are not you.”

* Optimize Your Life (And Decisions) For Fewer Regrets: “Making a decision can be painful — not because you might get it wrong, but because it forces you to sacrifice all but one of your possible futures. A future that’s unpredictable but in your control.”

* How to Change Your Perspective according to Shane Parrish (short video)

* The Power Of Flexible Consistency: “Instead of having an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach to life, where each failure or unexpected event can derail a routine, flexible consistency offers a set of principles to bounce back and keep on making progress.”

* If You Must Worry, Do It On Paper: “Writing down your worries forces you to slow down — which can make think a bit clearer and often opens up a bit of space for reflection, meditation and positive thinking.”

* Killer Instinct: “One of the laws of Resistance is that Resistance is always strongest at the finish.”

* Friendships In The Time Of COVID: “One of the main reasons many friendships eventually fall apart is because other people take our time. We find lovers or have children, and they are our priority. It’s difficult for someone to feel as if they’re no longer a priority.”

* Make The Power Move: “The Power Move is always a simple bodily movement that punches through any psychological resistance.”

* The Spiral of Silence: “Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe.”

* Negativity Bias: “While the negativity bias used to be a useful survival mechanism, it has a powerful—and often unconscious—impact on the way we behave, think, and build relationships.”

* A Few Rules To Live By: “The only thing worse than thinking everyone who disagrees with you is wrong is the opposite.”

* Understanding Others’ Emotions (short video): “Do you want empathy or do you want a solution?”

* Nothing is “Beyond” Self-Improvement: ” Choices about what to do are really choices about who to be. Navigating this never-ending parade of options is part and parcel of the self-improvement enterprise, and the self-improvement enterprise never meaningfully ends.”

* The Inner Superpower That Makes Us Human: “We can learn what our impulses are, reflect on whether they’re helpful, and practice not always acting on them.”

* The Observer Effect: Seeing Is Changing: “In general, we change our behavior when we expect to be seen. We never know when we’re being watched, so we act as if it’s all the time.”

The Never-Ending Now: “All media works us over completely… and leaves no part of us untouched, unaffected, and unaltered. The medium is the message.”

*Dan Gilbert Interview (Video): “Great short video on business, life, revitalizing your community, entrepreneurship and leadership.”

* Thinking For Oneself: “Wisdom is earned, not given. When other people give us the answer, it belongs to them and not us.”

* How Smart People Make Better Decisions: “Every decision has a consequence, and that consequence has another consequence you are probably not aware of.”

* Time Anxiety: “We limit ourselves by always calculating the best potential outcome through our personal perception of possible. Beating time anxiety means shifting our focus from outcomes to output so we can spend our energy on things we can actually control.”

* What Visual Illusions Can Teach Us About Our Polarized World: “We’re not seeing reality. Our vision runs 100 milliseconds behind the real world.”

* The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals: “The answer is complicated and likely multifaceted. Most of us are just amateurs.”

* When The Magic Happens: “We know that creativity and discovery surge when people are forced to find, rather than just want, new solutions.”

* How to Live Without Regret (5 min. video): “8x Olympic medalist Apolo Ohno discusses internal battles and focusing on the process instead of the outcome.”

* Structured Distraction: How To Make The Most Of Breaks: “Knowing that being distracted is a natural state for our brain, how can we bring some structure to this natural rhythm?”

* How To Restore High-Level Thinking: “The right mental breaks can replenish brain energy, increase productivity and improve your performance.”

* Learn Faster and Remember More: “The greatest enemy of learning is what you think you know. Overcoming our egos can be one of the big challenges of learning.”

* You Can Get There From Here: “Time functions as a kind of true alchemy — it can dissolve any experience, no matter how permanent it seems as it’s happening, and replace it with another. It can turn lead into gold.”

* Mike Wallace Interview featuring Rod Serling: “The creator of The Twilight Zone television series talks about censorship, keeping artistic integrity when working with commerce and corporate sponsors, and a range of other topics that true artists will appreciate”

* The Ugly Scramble: “There is no topic in business and investing that gets more attention than risk. But risk has little to do with what’s going to happen next and a lot to do with how much you can endure, and how calmly you can react to, whatever happens next.”

* Finding A Mindfulness Practice That Works For You: “Mindfulness practice is more than just sitting still or slowing down our actions.  Knowing your reasons for engaging with a mindfulness practice will steer you towards something that works for you.”

* The Power Of Thinking Inside The Box: “Thinking inside the box necessitates a shift in mindset: one that states that all the building blocks for innovation are right there in front of you, and that the solution only requires the reorganization of existing elements.”

* How To Think: “No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems.”