Bias toward fairness happens when we try to present two sides to a story in order to give the impression of being fair in the telling.

What is wrong with this?

The problem here is that we let the optics of equity inform the facts of the story. Some stories have only one side, some have more than two. When we don’t tell the facts as they are, we are not delivering the truth, but rather a version of it that would look and sound more agreeable.

And anything that manipulates the truth is always dangerous.

Cue. Routine. Reward. This sequence of three steps form the habit loop. Our brain identifies the start and end of a habit by the cue (conditions that resemble those of a past task pattern) and the reward (the goal of the task). During the interim time, it lets the previously memorized routine kick in while taking a back seat in decision making. This allows it to divert mental energy to other newer tasks.

The human brain can’t differentiate between a good and a bad habit. Routines and patterns get saved all the time. That’s why we don’t see when a monthly trip to McDonald’s becomes a weekly or daily ritual.

However understanding this loop helps us to control and manage our habits. Eliminating the cue for a bad habit means we cut it off at the source. Another way is to form new better habits whose urges crowd out the impulses of the old ones.

Habits are all about routines. It’s important to keep at them.

Am I naive to hope for goodness and fairness in this world?

A few incidents in my personal and professional lives triggered this question in my mind and it has been plaguing me all day. When we operate under the presumptive belief of good in people, it is painful to have those hopes dashed, to face upto the unfairness in everyday life. When it has happened once too often, we start questioning whether we are the ones with the problem, for having unrealistic expectations. And then cynicism takes over.

I received an honest answer for that question today.

I am probably naive and I am definitely going to be hurt several more times. But in the end, there is no real option B here. Hoping for and believing in good will most definitely be a hard path to walk but not holding out hope will be even more painful. So I will continue to believe in the good in this world, not because it will be validated, but because there is no better alternative.

It is easy to be judgemental nowadays, feel superior to those around us. We have multiple platforms that give us a place to voice our opinions and deliver verdict. But the truth is we are not better than the people around us. They are just standing in a pit today, so it looks like we are taller.

There comes a time in every person’s life when he/she needs the help of another fellow human being. The only difference is that today, someone else is asking. Tomorrow, it could be you or me.

Let’s not forget that.

A new recipe I tried recently didn’t pan out as expected (pun intended). The consistency was far thinner than desired with the result being that the end product couldn’t hold its shape. When I shared the information with my mom, she suggested an ingredient to add that could fix the consistency. And voila, it worked like magic!

She had never tried the recipe before. But she was able to process the given parameters to recommend a solution anyway. That’s the unique power of experience – the ability to apply existing knowledge to an off-script mix of conditions.

It’s something that can only be achieved by putting in those hours. No accelerated crash course can give us that.

Re-discovered this song and felt the magic of the lyrics wash over me once again. Thanks to the unexpected gift of forgetfulness 🙂

Just as we cannot reach the finish line if we are running with our eyes fixed on what’s behind us; similarly, we cannot live our lives while looking backwards. The only way to live our lives to the fullest is to learn from the past but look to the future.

A survey conducted in a customer service centre found that customers who had made multiple previous calls to resolve an issue were highly likely to give a low rating to the quality of the last call even if that operator resolved the problem. They do this to express the frustration of the previous unsuccessful attempts. This is referred to as “baggage”.

To address this problem, they conducted two parallel experiments. One where the operator ignores the history of calls made. And the other where the operator acknowledges the fact and gives the customer an opportunity to tell what they had tried already. They referred to this approach as “baggage handling”. The results were striking. The customer was found to be 86% more likely to rate the service quality higher in the second scenario.

In both cases, the operator resolved the problem faced by the customer, so the operation-related service was of the same standard. But simply acknowledging the frustration and listening to him/her significantly reduced the negative feelings he/she had associated with the company’s service so far.

It is a lesson that applies in all spheres of life. Acknowledge each other’s pain/frustration. It always works better than ignoring.

In the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl, the character of Valery Legasov, the scientist who led the investigation to identify the cause for the nuclear disaster, makes some powerful statements about the price of lies.

When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember that it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
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We are so focused on finding the truth that we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.
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Where I once would fear the cost of truth, I now only ask: What is the cost of lies?

In the case of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union paid the ultimate price for hiding the truth. Even so, it is easy for us to dismiss this when we are viewing the aftermath in digital technicolor from the comfort of our homes. It is all the more important in today’s world where misinformation is used as a strategy to distract us from the facts. Chernobyl is a cautionary tale about how suppressing criticism and spreading lies doesn’t alter the truth. Nor does it protect us from the consequences.

The truth is always there, whether we acknowledge it or not.

There are no tangible or even intangible tools to measure self-worth. Maybe that is why we fall into the trap of looking to others for validation. But they can only tell us what value we hold to them.

In reality, self-worth must come from within. The term should be our first clue. It is not determined by our achievements, fame, money, power or lack of any of them either.

We are not worth less when we weren’t succeeding in our goals. And something that is probably said less often – our self-worth doesn’t increase when we do start to flourish. Only our feeling of entitlement does.