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This is pre-hindsight — using imagination to predict obvious failure modes.

I have a flight to Thailand coming up in a few days and hadn’t thought much about it until recently. I was planning on winging it upon arrival but decided to try pre-hindsight to see what might go wrong. Right away, I realized that if I have issues it may be due to visa requirements. A quick search revealed that visas wouldn’t be an issue as long as I had an exit flight already booked. I added this to my todo list. Another pre-hindsight check then painted a picture of me sitting in a Thai airport staring at “buy exit flight” entry on my todo list. So I immediately bought a ticket. This seems like a trivial instance but the core mental move was the one described above.

Pre-hindsight can help with revealing more painful failure modes, as well. I have a goal of getting the Thinking Toys Newsletter to 1000 subscribers by the end of the year. Running pre-hindsight on it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Not only am I unlikely to succeed but it’s not even clear if I’m doing anything to make it possible. My current plan is to continue doing “more of the same” but extrapolating the current trend has me falling far short of the goal. Pre-hindsight helps highlight when I’m dealing with a wish rather than a goal. And this is valuable to know. I’d prefer not to be trying to fool myself any more than necessary. How much of your life revolves around goals without a corresponding plan of action? 

This power is a bit curious to me. By imagining a hypothetical, our mind can identify “obvious” new insights. But if they’re so obvious, why didn’t we already know them? Why must we consciously move our attention in this pattern of pre-hindsight to reveal the insight? We may be toeing the edge of the capabilities of our mind. Powers that are accessible but require a conscious nudge to access. Perhaps enough practice with a broad enough set of Thinking Toys makes such superpowers available to everyone.

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We often find ourselves in heated situations. Sometimes in the middle of arguments I “snap to” and wonder how I got there. It seems like this often occurs through a kind of Flow state. We “lose ourselves” — our sense of embodied agency — andbecome the interaction, for better or worse. On the plus side, this can bring a lot of passion and energy into our actions. It can also backfire, as we’ve all experienced. There is one powerful mental move for interrupting these flow states: presencing. You can presence yourself in many ways — one is by placing your attention over your entire body. You may immediately notice your energy levels, temperature, heart rate, and random discomforts. Then you can expand your attention to also encompass your surroundings. This may trigger noticing of objects in your environment that were being ignored. It may bring you to see other people in a new light. A pause can often be enough to turn an unpleasant interaction completely around. Or to identify possibilities hidden from view.

Depending on whom you ask, this is a variation of “mindfulness”. Luckily, you don’t need an app or a trip to the monastery for it. You already do it all the time. Yet, being aware that you can control it is empowering. By widening your scope of attention, automatic patterns get interrupted. Thoughts and actions can come to a screeching halt. It often feels quite pleasant. I deliberately try to trigger presencing moves when I become aware of a variety of warning signs. For example, when I am feeling excitement combined with contractive emotions — frustration, stress, righteousness. In general, if I notice myself trying to Feel Right about something, I try to enact a presencing. Also, I’ve built a few deliberate habits around the move. Lately, I’ve been doing it every time before unlocking my phone. 

By flow states, I mean something a little bit different from Csikszentmihalyi’s version. I’m in flow whenever my attention is moving in patterned, predictable, automatic ways. This is always happening within some specific, narrow field of attention. In an argument, we will be laser-focused on the way people communicate their reasons. While writing, we concentrate on sensing the resonance between written words and feelings. When brushing our teeth, some attention is in tune with a sense of how much time we spend in each part of the mouth. When cued by a reward, we have a hard time avoiding thinking about it. There are peaks and valleys of reward and punishment, predictable stimulus and response. These are spirals of affect generated as we bounce off the world in familiar ways. Some of these flow states are more fun than others, of course. But they all inhabit modes of habitual patterns of attention. There is nothing good or bad here, but being in habitual pattern makes it difficult to take new action. By rearranging the field of attention, presencing breaks us out of these flow states and allows for new, unpredictable action.

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Coming up with goals that feel worth achieving can be a struggle in an of itself. Unfortunately, merely formulating a desirable goal is rarely enough to succeed. The next critical step is planning the implementation. Forming implementation intentions helps with this. In my experience, it is one of the most powerful mental moves. They start where goals leave off: some outcome that you want to achieve. From there, you choose an action that will move you towards that outcome. Given that action, you form an implementation intention by choosing a specific when, where, and how. You envision and commit to the details of what your action will be in response to which precise cues. This planning process helps form a new stimulus-response pattern. With practice, it will automatically — subconsciously — occur under the envisioned conditions.

 

I use a simple implementation intention to help with my goal of learning more from other people. The cue is whenever someone excitedly mentions going to an event. The action I take in response is to ask them “What was your biggest takeaway?”. To install this pattern, I mentally practiced different variations of people presenting the cue — specific, recent examples — and then taking my response action. After a few weeks of practicing a few minutes a day in my head, and a few real-world triggers, the pattern of response became automatic.

 

A few conditions can increase the odds of success for an implementation intention. First, the triggering cue should be clear and precise. Something concrete that you can visualize. Rather than “When I wake up” try “When I press the off button on my alarm”. Second, the intended action needs to happen with consistency. You want to desire to, and be able to, always take the action when you encounter the cue. If there are situations where you don’t think that will happen, try to carve them out of your cue. For example, “When I press the off button on my alarm, except on weekends or when it’s raining out or when someone is sleeping over”. Finally, ensure that the action you want to take is one that furthers a goal you care about. If you don’t see the connection between your action and your goal, you won’t care enough to execute on it. Be able to answer why you want to take the particular action. If (cue), then (action), because (reason).

 

It’s hard to overstate the power of implementation intentions. I want to keep this introductory post short to communicate the basic idea. I intend to write a follow-up post to highlight the wide variety of possibilities made available with this tool. To hint at the potential, here are a few ideas for implementation intentions:

1. Every day after brushing your teeth in the bathroom, do 20 push-ups
2. Whenever someone is presenting a contorted facial expression, ask them what they are feeling
3. When someone tells you their name, repeat it back to them and do it again at the end of the conversation
4. When you finish a block of work and want to take a break, make a short note on what you think the next steps are
5. Every morning right after turning your alarm off, sit up and smile
6. While taking out your phone and unlocking it, close your eyes and take 3 deep breaths while paying attention to how your body feels

 

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Is there something in your life or work that you’ve been trying to solve but can’t seem to make progress on? Perhaps it even seems impossible. Try posing the miracle question… Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and a miracle has occurred. What’s a small change that would make you exclaim: “wow the problem is gone and here’s how I know!” Answering this can be difficult. Your first response will often be “I don’t know”, or something along those lines. This is frustrating but normal. Sit with it for 5-10 minutes. Start generating a list of responses that are not quite right or even obviously bad. Eventually, you may hit on something interesting and surprise yourself. Once you have an answer, you can often generate a way to move towards it. Ask yourself, what can you do that would help you move towards this new world, even if only in a small way? This may generate a specific goal or action. Ideally, frame it as a positive rather than a negative: something you do rather than something you avoid doing.

 

I’m experiencing a growing frustration with a lack of progress on a big project I’m interested in. I’ve been nibbling along the edges but have a sense that a lot more is possible. Posing the miracle question helped. After about 5 minutes of “I don’t know”, I was able to start generating some bad answers. After another 5 minutes of those, I wrote down something that seemed quite good. In hindsight, it seems silly that I didn’t think of it right away, but that’s often how these things go. I found that I’d feel like my sense of a lack of progress would resolve by seeing the results of an experiment. Specifically, a hypothetical experiment on a few friendly participants that tests some implicit assumptions. My next action follows pretty smoothly from that realization!

 

Sometimes finding a positive action or goal is the difficult part. You know what the world would look like when your problem is gone but you have no idea how to take a step in that direction. Fortunately, having a list of bad ideas is better than no list at all. If you can carve out enough examples of things that won’t work, you can try inverting them. Also, you can compare new ideas to the bad ones to try to help understand what is missing. A bad model is better than no model at all.

 

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“When these pigeons were confronted with the banana out of reach, the box present but displaced from under it, and no spot was on the wall, they looked back and forth between banana and box at first, appearing “confused” to human observers. Then, within less than two minutes, they abruptly began to push the box in the direction of the banana, stopped when it was underneath, climbed and pecked.” (Epstein, Kirshnit, Lanza, & Rubin, 1984).

Sometimes we’ll have a big goal that we’re excited about but can’t seem to make progress on. It can be so big and important that we feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it. Making a plan seems like the prudent first step — with a good plan success seems more likely. But even making this plan feels overwhelming and scary. It’s such a big undertaking and there is a lot of pressure to get it right because we care about the goal. As a result, we procrastinate and fail to make any progress at all. In this situation, it often makes sense to granularize. Don’t try to plan the whole thing. Take a best guess at a first milestone that we will need to hit and figure out how to get there. Break up that path into small steps and define a next action that you can take immediately. If it’s too big or uncertain to be something we can start immediately, break it up further. Once we have a doable next action, it’s often effortless to begin.

 

I’m interested in the study of developmental psychology. To better understand the field, I made a goal to review the academic literature. While excited about the project, I felt overwhelmed — the field is massive with dozens of seminal works. I wanted to do it right — to have a complete plan of attack. Unfortunately, I didn’t make much progress for a while. Upon noticing this pattern of procrastination, I tried to granularize. I picked a first milestone of reading a single popular work by someone that I was already familiar with. I found the book available online and started reading immediately. By making it OK to start somewhere imperfect, it enabled initial progress which led to eventual momentum.

 

For big projects and ambitious goals, it is tempting to think we need the perfect plan. It seems like we can make one if only we set aside the time and energy. Unfortunately, this planning process itself can turn into something scary and overwhelming. Rather than starting, you delay. If you notice this happening for a while, consider whether your desire to plan is useful. Almost always you can proceed productively with little to no plan. Try guessing at some initial steps that will move you in the general desired direction and focus on executing those. If you’re worried that the first milestone is a bad one, see if you can develop falsifiable tests. What would you need to see to know if you were on the wrong track? Finally, it’s important to conclude this process at a fine enough granularity. Have you generated a next action that you can take immediately? If not, it may continue to be difficult to start. Keep breaking up your steps into smaller and more granular actions.

 

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When was the last time that you were examining an issue and noticed yourself becoming emotional? Maybe it was something like anger or frustration. Or it was a voice telling you how stupid you were or how obvious something is. Often times, there is more content behind these reactions than meets the eye. You are examining some set of parts and are being disturbed or distracted by others. There may be some conflict here. Focusing is a great way to start understanding this but many other skills help. One of them is learning to do what I call self-decomposition. When you find yourself unable to maintain attention on an individual part, it helps to step back. Treat everything that comes up as its own distinct part. Each is separate from You, the impartial observer. Rather than feeling dismissive or angry or frustrated, try seeing it as “some part of me is feeling dismissive.” Attend to each one in order, be curious and try to see what it perceives from its perspective.

 

My typical pattern is to have a reaction where some part I’m examining gets called “stupid” or “silly”. The best move is to then examine that name calling part. Rather than myself calling something stupid, I step back and notice “some part of me feels this is stupid”. Right away this reduces some of the associated tension. With this distance, I can examine it impartially to try to see what else it wants to say. As an example, I used to have a dominant frame of viewing religious ritual as silly. The Sabbath, keeping kosher, etc. This reaction dominated whenever I tried to understand the value of rituals. Only when I was able to make some distance between my “self” and the “silliness” reaction was I able to hear from it. It was trying to keep me from being “just like everyone else” — that part wanted me to be special and unique. This was nice to hear, so I accepted and appreciated it. And then was able to look at the merits of ritual without interruption. This allowed me to start to see ritual in a new light.

 

A variety of triggers can signal a new part arising and the potential need to create distance from it. Sometimes it’s an obvious emotion that overcomes you. If examining something makes you angry or sad, consider trying to treat it as just another part of you. Sometimes parts step in more subtly. If you keep seeking distraction or feel unease, that can be a clue. Paying attention to the patterns of how your mind moves when attending to issues will highlight your own unique triggers.

 

It’s important to distinguish self-decomposition from the psychological defense mechanism of dissociation. It is similar since dissociation allows you to avoid certain experiences — unpleasant emotions. The problem with dissociation is it tries to completely ignore the experience — that part of you. This prevents making progress by being able to curiously examine it and see what it is trying to tell you. When doing self-decomposition, we don’t want to completely hide parts from our awareness. We seek to hold them at arms-length rather than wearing them like clothes or hiding them like a mess in the closet.

 

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Do you notice yourself waffling between different approaches to a  problem? Half-assing two strategies and not making the kind of progress that seems possible? This can feel like stuckness or indecision between two paths. Sometimes it’s experienced as a recurring pattern of distraction. One potential solution is bargaining — coming to an internal agreement where each strategy gets a full-assed attempt at success rather than simultaneously half-assing both. Before proceeding, it’s best to empathize with the two sides and seek alternative approaches. If those still leave you feeling stuck between two paths, then try bargaining. Propose a set of terms that allows you to commit to trying one strategy before switching to the other. If you succeed, you may notice immediate relief from associated anxiety and second-guessing.

 

Bargaining works when you can make the side of the strategy-that-will-go-second feel secure. Unfortunately, it often gets thrown under the bus. You know what this feels like. “I’ll check Twitter for an extra 5 minutes now and then not again until tomorrow.” Often when faced with a short-term urge, we sacrifice our future self. If one path feels more immediately enjoyable, it tends to work best if that one goes second. When both paths feel equal in desire then the ordering matters less. In that scenario, the important move is to state the terms of the agreement in a clearly measurable way.

 

For a while, I bounced between writing publicly and free-flowing private theorizing. Often when I engaged with one, I would start to feel guilty about not working on the other. Earlier this year, I decided to see if I could fix this dynamic. I decided to spend a few weeks at a time working on private notes and then switch to focusing on public blog posts for the same length of time. I planned to try this strategy for 3 months and then reassess. By constructing a bargain that both of these desires approved of, they were able to stop interrupting each other. Immediately, associated feelings of anxiety or guilt from ignoring one or the other disappeared. This left me free to assess the merits of each one independently.

 

Once you’ve empathized with the different sides, you build up some trust that you can use to bargain. By keeping promises that parts will “get their chance”, they will often stop nagging you in the interim. This nagging is the anxiety, indecision, and distraction-seeking that presents when two parts are in conflict. When a part feels heard and trusts an agreement, it often stops sapping your energy and frees up your attention. Self-trust is crucial here. Without it, your parts won’t believe in the negotiation process.

 

We often bargain to deceive or manipulate our future selves. “I really want this cookie now but I know it’s bad for me. I can justify it if I promise myself to spend an extra 30 minutes at the gym later!” This is the dark side of bargaining. We tend to fail to hold up the future end in these scenarios. This builds resentment in the part that cares about the “good in the long-run side” and erodes self-trust. With reduced self-trust, parts become skeptical of any bargaining and we lose the ability to do so. You can check-in with the parts of you to see if they already feel this way, thereby beginning the process of restoring trust. If you notice yourself trying to bargain to enable an immediate urge, try to pause and increase awareness of the pattern. Consider reversing the ordering — allow yourself the indulgence but only after the “good side” goes first. Allow yourself a cookie after the gym. Ideally, you can avoid this type of bargain entirely.

 

As Ainslie argues in Breakdown of Will: “Will, in short, is a bargaining situation, where credibility is power.” (good overview here). Building this trust is a matter of bargaining fairly — being curious when you listen to the parts — and honoring your agreements. This is easier when you consider more contingencies in advance. Try to think of all the ways your plan may hit exceptions and cause you to break the agreement. Account for these in advance of imposing the bargain.

 

One common failure mode of internal bargaining is a lack of clarity in the terms. It works best to stick to conditions that are falsifiable. You should be able to easily tell when one strategy has succeeded or failed or when it’s had its fair turn. Track things in time or money, or other measurable outcomes (win/lose). Be specific about how much is “enough”.

 

Where has bargaining worked well for you? In what scenarios has it failed?

 

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There are parts of the world that don’t make sense. Some of these also generate a strong emotional reaction. People exist that hold very different beliefs from us. But can we say that we understand their perspectives? A common place to look is in politics. You also see it when people butt heads over metaphysics, core beliefs or values — religion, science, spirituality, etc.

 

Find one of these viewpoints. Something that feels particularly crazy or wrong to you but that you know others feel good about. As soon as you bring it to mind, you may notice an emotional response. Some aversiveness, or smugness, or even hatred. Try to acknowledge that response while also setting it aside. Instead, try to imagine how the world appears from this wacky perspective. Imagine a hypothetical holder of this view and try to empathize with them. Imagine this person, so different from you, is not merely confused. What was their childhood like? What are their hopes and fears? What would it take for you to believe what they do?

 

Notice how you may tend to paint this hypothetical person in a negative light. We tend to elevate our own perspective and perceive the other’s as inferior or degenerate. This effect is greater the more different the other appears. This is a natural response but is not helpful to this exercise. Try to set this aside and look from their eyes with compassion and curiosity. What do they know that you don’t? What have they seen that you haven’t?

 

How can we know when we’re doing this “right”? Check if you believe that the other person would agree with your description of them. If it feels condescending or paints them in a foolish light, you are probably missing the mark. People don’t tend to see themselves that way. You probably don’t consider your most strongly held beliefs as unintelligent or ignorant.

 

I’ve been a generally politically left-leaning person for most of my life. Also, I tend to reductionism and a scientific approach to understanding the world. Over the past few years, I’ve put in a lot of effort in exploring other approaches. What I continue to find is valuable knowledge embedded in (previously) foreign traditions and mindsets. Seeing how other systems navigate the world also helps me see the flaws in my rigid perspective. Yet, I know that I’m still scratching the surface of possibility and am working hard to improve.

 

This is Curiosity. Not the easy kind where we get excited and dive into things that seem useful. This is the hard kind: where things seem wrong, foreign, yucky, or bad. And yet, this is often where the juiciest insight is hiding — the places we have a hard time looking into. The more we can be curious, the more powerful we become. You become more able to connect with people that appear totally different from yourself. You become more able to see things in the world that your peers may be missing. Your implicit models improve and your actions become more effective.

 

And it seems like we can get better. Curiosity feels like a muscle. The weight we are lifting is that of emotional resistance to experience. We can exercise this muscle by coming up against this resistance. Toeing the line and feeling the discomfort. The more we try this exercise of pushing our boundaries, the easier it is the next time around.

 

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