Archivo por meses: marzo 2025

The Painful Reality Of Unteachable Lessons

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The other day I was frustrated with my adolescent son for making the same mistakes time and time again, even when warned and knowing the consequences. But he is not the only one. We all resist learning sometimes, even when it is obvious to everybody else.

Then I had a serendipitious finding: Chris Williamson discusses why we’re wired to learn our lessons the hard way.

A few quotes:

  • Oscar Wilde wrote «Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.»
  • «A man makes mistakes, a smart man learns from his mistakes, a brilliant man leans from other’s mistakes.»
  • «When we find the same kind of problem time and time again, it means that life is trying to teach us something that we haven’t learned.»

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But there’s much more! Chris is a curious person and has learnt a thing or two in 900 episodes interviewing very intelligent people. Here’s some food for thought.

00:00 Unteachable Lessons

07:37 Reverse Charisma

14:52 Don’t Trade Your Lifestyle for Money

18:33 Deliberate De-Optimisation

24:01 From Operator Guy to Idea Guy

33:38 What Gays & Lesbians Think of Bisexuals

37:30 The Birth Order Effect

39:25 We Are What We Pretend to Be

45:56 How to Not Be Needy

49:53 Find Someone You Feel Safe Being a Burden To

52:11 5 Questions to Ask Yourself in a Relationship

55:22 How to Make Marriage an Easy Guess

56:07 Thoughts on the Black Pill Community

Los 5 motivos principales por los que los empleados solicitan apoyo emocional (y 5 ideas extra para mejorar tu bienestar)

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BH Bienestar ha lanzado su análisis anual sobre el uso de su Programa de Apoyo al Empleado. Los datos reflejan que la ansiedad, las dificultades familiares y la depresión están en el top 3 de los motivos más frecuentes por los que los empleados han solicitado apoyo emocional en 2024.

Algunas ideas:

  • La ansiedad se mantiene en el primer puesto, siendo el principal motivo de consulta de 2024 con un 25% sobre el total y, en tercer lugar, el ánimo depresivo con un 14% de consultas.
  • Unos datos que reflejan la creciente incidencia de los trastornos psicológicos en la población activa en España. Según el último informe de Atención Primaria publicado por el Ministerio de Sanidad, en España la ansiedad afecta ya a un 12% de la población y la depresión, a un 4,7%; convirtiéndose así en los dos trastornos psicológicos con mayor incidencia en nuestro país. 
  • El 81% de las consultas están vinculadas a problemáticas no laborales, mientras que solo el 19% tienen relación directa con el entorno profesional​. Un aspecto que se ve reflejado si prestamos atención al segundo motivo más frecuente de consulta: las dificultades familiares y de pareja (19%).
  • Por otro lado, el desarrollo de habilidades personales o profesionales mediante coaching (11%) y estrés laboral (10%), ocupan también puestos determinantes siendo el cuarto y quinto motivo de consulta respectivamente.

(Fuentes: Noticia en Equipos y Talento y estudio original en BH Bienestar)

Si te preocupa tu bienestar, tal vez te interesen otros posts anteriores con ideas para mejorarlo:

Everything You Know About Overpopulation Is Wrong | Stephen Shaw

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Everyday the fearmongers in the infoxication media scare us with the last crisis and emergency, until it goes out of fashion. Then they sell you the next thing to be scared of. Of course, they don’t do it so that you make the best decisions, but to promote the interests of those who pay them.

In fact, it can all be considered a case of obfuscation. Instead of hiding the truth, they hide among so much noise and so much banal information that you are not able to focus on the key issues and challenges for our civilization. Like slow extinction.

Many people believe the world is becoming overpopulated…the reality will shock you.

In this speech, Stephen Shaw explains how rapidly declining birth rates are putting many countries in danger of disappearing within a few generations.

Reversing the narratives around children and population growth is critical for the sake of our civilisations. It will help us design the changes that our society needs to survive, instead of the useless snakeoil remedies that our politicians and media sell to us.

They say «You’ll have nothing and you’ll be happy», or «You won’t have a good job, your own house nor children but you can have cats instead.» They also defend that making it difficult for our young couples to create a family and instead importing unskilled uncivilized people is the solution to all our problems.

Let’s not sacrifice our offspring for our material confort. Go make a baby! 😉 Or encourage others to do so before it’s too late.

00:00 – Haunted by the Future

00:19 – The Missing Conversation on Parenthood

01:36 – The Silent Crisis of Low Birth Rates

02:52 – Debunking Overpopulation Fears

04:24 – The Mathematics of Population Decline

06:18 – The Economic and Social Impact

09:20 – The Rise of Childlessness

12:42 – The Challenge of Reversing the Trend

The broken window fallacy, Troyan horse ideas, and how to avoid making terrible economic decisions

Last month I talked about goals and incentives (La importancia de los incentivos, y cómo el 99% de la gente (incluidos los directivos) no los entiende) and about how people are blind to the failure of their projects (La teoría del caballo muerto o cómo nos negamos a afrontar los problemas). Following those ideas, today I want to talk about the economic myopia of most people.

I don’t know if it is because I studied some economy or because of my experience in many organizations, but I can spot bad economic ideas from a mile, even if they are disguised in good intentions. But I don’t think I’m a genius. What surprises me is how most people accept or buy into «Troyan horse ideas«: sugar-candy proposals that will bring terrible results.

  • Why do politicians always seem to create more economic problems when they intervene to «solve» the previous ones?
  • Why can’t people understand that what seem like good ideas in the short term have bad consequences?
  • Why do we insist in the same recipes that sound attractive but have proven wrong several times in history?
  • Why don’t we understand that everything has pros and cons, and that there are no solutions, only compromises?

There many examples, like printing money, fixing prices, raising taxes and tariffs, taking money from people who work to give it to those who create nothing, doing a bad job for a customer, being dishonest, eating too much and exercicing too little, spending more than you earn, etc.

In this video we learn about the broken window fallacy and how it can help us improve our economic understanding of the world.

Some key questions that you need to ask every time you are proposed an idea:

  • What’s been broken? Why? (Root causes, not symthoms) Have we understood how the problem was created?
  • Is your proposal better or worse than the problem? Is it better or worse than other proposals? What other solutions have worked / not worked in the past? What are the pros and cons of each of them? Are you solving the problem provisionally and making it worse in the long term? What are the evident and not so evident risks?
  • How is this solution going to solve the problem? How are you going to measure its success? Will you change it if it doesn’t work or is counter productive?
  • At what cost? What are the drawbacks? What wealth is the proposal going to destroy? Will it create more problems somewhere else?
  • Who’s paying and who’s benefiting from it? Is it overall good for the society? Even so, is it fair and ethical? Does it break individual rights?
  • Is this idea yours or are you repeating someone else’s without any criticism? Do you have an emotional attachment? What are your biases and blind spots?
  • Are you risking something if your solution doesn’t work? Do you have a personal interest in it? Who will win or lose something if it works and if it doesn’t?

Next time you have or are proposed a «great idea», please use these questions to help other people think rationally.

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