Command respect with the right hobby, know how to make your ideas stick and learn from my great-grandma’s Stoic wisdom. Having read and written about hundreds of interesting ideas and concepts, I’ve inevitably made some personal observations about critical thinking, philosophy, decision-making and human nature myself. Here are twelve laws, aphorisms, biases, effects and principles I’ve coined or come up with myself.
1. Martial Arts Effect
Not all hobbies are created equal. As a general rule, some will earn you pity, others instant respect.
Try telling your coworkers you like to paint in your free time. Chances are they picture you attempting a portrait of Jesus or cobbling together something approximating an expressive art piece. Put differently, people will assume that you’re a terrible painter until you prove them otherwise.
You’ll get different reactions when your hobby is kickboxing, krav maga or jiu-jitsu. The uninitiated seem to assume by default that you’re good at it. Both painting and martial arts are complex skills that take years to master. However, it looks like martial arts command instant respect due to overcaution and the wish for self-preservation.
2. Influencer Perception Bias
Influencer Perception Bias is related to Labour Perception Bias, the idea that we tend to ignore the expertise and years of experience that went into performing a seemingly simple task. Similarly, the more popular and famous an influencer becomes and the more followers they get, the less important it is what they say or write.
Former soccer stars cash in for “analysing” Champions League matches with platitudes such as “The players were missing that last 10%.” or “This is football.” Elon Musk could get 10k likes easily for randomly posting “People love to be right.” The truth is that celebrity status has to be earned by doing something substantive. (Usually.) But there’s a tipping point where influencers get more credit for who they have become than for what they say or write.
Notably this bias can affect the influencers themselves. They may falsely believe they’re popular for expressing mundane truths, thinking it would be easy for others to achieve the same by following their lead. In reality, their everyday remarks are only applauded because they’re popular. They forget about the years of expertise, experience and status they built to get into a position where they get praised for making commonplace statements.
3. Battered Uniform Principle
My Battered Uniform Principle says that a visibly worn utility uniform confers status on its wearer as it signals practical experience and seniority.
A brand new Brazilian jiu-jitsu uniform (Gi) and belt without any wear marks look as if they have never touched the mat. It will make the wearer look inexperienced and lower status in the sport. A battered and faded Gi is an indication of the blood, sweat and possibly tears left on the mats, on the uniform and in the washing machine during innumerate wash cycles.
In the military, a clean yet battered and washed-out combat uniform is testimony of hours spent in the field. It distinguishes the experienced serviceman from the inexperienced recruit or office soldier. I once knew a corporal with two deployments who was immensely proud that his once green-brown battle dress was so washed-out that it had practically turned into snow camouflage.
Note, the condition of the uniform is one signal out of many. To a degree, the Battered Uniform Principle is also irrespective of rank. For obvious reasons, the rule does not apply to formal attire such as dress uniforms or office suits.
4. Meyer’s Dictum
Meyer’s Dictum encapsulates a lesson I have learned from writing about interesting observations and concepts for more than two years:
Any mundane quote, idea or concept can catch on if you elevate it to the status of a law, principle or rule.
Framed positively, if you want an idea to be memorable, give it a catchy name.
5. Principle of Asymmetric Excitement
The Principle of Asymmetric Excitement states:
What’s special for you is just another day at work for someone else.
I was only 19 when I started relocating luxury cars at a Mercedes-Benz dealership. I couldn’t believe they would let me drive their brand-new vehicles. But the novelty and excitement of driving a Mercedes soon wained off. It became a job with occasional peaks when there was an S-Class or AMG roadster that needed relocating.
Every once in a while a pensioner would come to the dealership to pick up his new base-model C-Class. It was a car he had been saving for half of his life. He was thrilled! Finally, he could drive his Mercedes. Now imagine how the salesman felt about delivering just another bland C-Class sedan.
This asymmetry applies to pretty much all sales and service industries. I found that the most successful sales and customer service people had the empathy to overcome the principle. They were able to experience and genuinely enjoy those moments of excitement through the eyes of the customer. Over and over again.
6. Godot’s Slaughterhouse
Godot’s Slaughterhouse is my term for the flip side of Altucher’s Headshot, the notion that receiving an email is like being shot in the head. If this is the case, then sending an email is like being shipped to Godot’s Slaughterhouse.
As the sender, you get this gut feeling that your life’s fate is now in someone else’s hands. Much like in Samuel Beckett’s absurd play Waiting for Godot, you don’t know when the reply will come or if you’ll receive one at all. You don’t know if the answer will be positive, negative, or worse, something in between. All you can do is hope you’ll soon forget you even sent the email.
Is it any surprise that people have found ways to cunningly time emails to weaponise them with…
7. Meyer’s Law
It’s Friday afternoon. 4:57 pm. Almost time to power down your laptop and enjoy your weekend. When suddenly an email pops up. Who sends these emails and why? Meyer’s Law applies:
Any email received on a Friday afternoon, shortly before close of business is bad news. Either the sender is terrified of the response, wants to ruin your weekend, or both.
You can try to quickly send a reply to return the favour. But chances are the person on the other end is already out of the office.
8. Riker’s Razor
If someone’s incompetence is too staggering to be true, they’re most likely faking it and you should find out why.
Riker’s Razor goes back to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Commander Will Riker wakes up in the sick bay, with amnesia and the command over the Enterprise. But things aren’t what they seem.
His crew is behaving far too stupidly. Data, the android, is slow to compute simple calculations. His engineer extraordinaire Geordi LaForge doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing either. Riker senses something is wrong: “You’re incapable of that level of incompetence, Mr La Forge!”
Eventually, Riker unmasks the whole crew as part of an enemy simulation designed to extract information from him. It was all a charade. So if someone’s incompetence is too staggering to be true, they’re most likely faking it and you should find out why. They may even display purposeful stupidity.
9. Meyer’s Second Law
Life is a constant loss of cabin pressure. Help yourself before helping others.
This aviation aphorism is based on the counterintuitive principle of always putting on your oxygen mask first, even before assisting your own kids. There’s a reason why airlines tell you that ad nauseam. What good are you to others if you don’t have a clear mind, are unconscious or dead? You just make everything worse for everyone else.
10. Collaborative Dismissiveness
Collaborative Dismissiveness (aka Evidence Treadmill) is my term for a manipulation tactic used in dishonest complaint handling. It comes in roughly two stages.
First, the organisation feigns friendly openness to your complaint, inviting you to share your concerns freely. However, they keep dismissing them out of hand with either bogus or no explanations.
This is followed by generic encouragement to ask any questions. Their answers only create more nonsense for you to refute. But no matter how well you argue or how much evidence you provide, you’re getting nowhere. Hope this helps.
Now comes your opportunity to request a review of their decision — to which you must provide new evidence. Of course, any new evidence you provide is also looked at with confirmation bias and dismissed on shaky grounds. But please do get in touch if you have further questions.
If you haven’t lost your temper or given up by now and still have arguments they haven’t dismissed yet, it’s time for stage two. The organisation sends a strongly-worded letter in which they suggest you’re being unreasonable. That being said, please let them know if there’s anything else they can do for you.
The goal of Collaborative Dismissiveness is to undermine your complaint without appearing uncooperative. It’s worth noting, though, that sometimes the other party may have a point.
11. Great-Grandma’s Law
Fortunate Misfortune is a moral paradox based on the idea that adversity and hardship are catalysts for growth and positive change. The Stoic idea is best summarised by a quote by my great-grandma:
No disadvantage is so big that there wouldn’t be an advantage to it.
12. Lonely Planet Test
The Lonely Planet Test is a test for the reliability and authenticity of a publication. It’s a concept from back when travelling with a heavy travel guide instead of a phone was more common.
If you want to find out how reliable and authentic a Lonely Planet book is, browse one of a place you intimately know. Your hometown or home country. What restaurants are supposedly “popular with the locals”? How do they portray the regional culture? With that credibility test in mind, go buy and read the Lonely Planet for your next destination.
The test can be applied to pretty much any publication as a means to calibrate your trust in it. It’s related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, the idea that any trust in the media is completely unwarranted.
Closing Thoughts
It goes without writing that none of my personal observations on critical thinking, philosophy or human nature are supported by evidence other than life experience, reading a lot and gut feeling. But give it a try. Observe your fellow human beings carefully, see if you can spot a pattern, pour it into words and give it a catchy name. Some day, some blogger may even write a post about it.
