Weekly Question & Framework: November 1, 2024

Hello and welcome to the Curiosity Chronicle Weekly Question and Framework. In three minutes or less, I'll give you one question and one framework to get you thinking going into the weekend. Without further ado, let's dive right into it. A question to Become a Luck Magnet Are you embracing your pattern interrupts? A few weeks ago, I got together for a mentorship chat with a young woman looking for some career and life advice. As she was telling me about her current professional track, the audit team at a big firm, I was subconsciously filling in the details of who she was, her interests, path and focus. This is natural. We all do this to fill in the blanks and make sense of the world and our interactions. I probably thought I had a pretty good sense of who she was until I asked about what gave her energy outside of work. I do stand up comedy on the weekends. Consider my mental model completely shattered. A member of an audit team at a big firm. A noble but very safe path who does one of the most terrifying things in the world stand up comedy for fun. Suddenly I found myself leaning in, fascinated, wanting to learn more and help. This was what I like to call a pattern interrupt. It was something unique that interrupted the pattern I was forming in my mind about her. In life, you're often told to mask or hide your pattern interrupts. You're told to blend in, to fit in, to go with the crowd. But that is the worst advice I can imagine. On the contrary, you should lean into your pattern interrupts. The same things that made you weird as a kid are what will make you successful as an adult. Your unique blend of interests, hobbies, and eccentricities attract lucky events into your life. People will seek you out. You become a magnet for interesting opportunities. But that can only happen if you embrace those pattern interrupts. If you let them shine, wear them as a badge of honor rather than something to be hidden away. What are your pattern interrupts? How can you embrace them fully? A Framework on the Power of Cliffhangers the Zeigarnik Effect American novelist Ernest Hemingway was famous for following an interesting practice when it came to his daily writing. He would always stop writing at a very interesting moment in the work. This seems counterintuitive. One would assume that continuing your flow through these interesting moments is more effective. But Hemingway had discovered something unique by leaving the writing with these cliffhanger moments. He found it easier to come back to the work and create that continued forward momentum. He felt more motivated and excited to sit back down and continue the writing. As it turns out, Hemingway was onto something scientifically. A psychologist named Bluma. Zeigarnik conducted a series of experiments in the 1920s that found that interrupted or incomplete tasks were remembered better than completed ones. In one of the experiments, 138 children were asked to go through simple tasks like puzzles and math problems. Half of the participants were allowed to complete the tasks, while half were stopped midway through. Participants were twice as likely to remember the incomplete tasks than the complete ones. The Zeigarnik effect is the aptly named psychological phenomenon that describes this tendency to remember the unfinished or interrupted tasks better than the completed ones. This research and Hemingway strategy might suggest there is value in leaving certain pieces of work strategically unfinished to make it easier to come back and continue during the next sitting. However, there is also research to suggest that unfinished tasks have a tendency to mentally bleed out into leisure time, creating a psychological weight that impacts enjoyment. The key is identifying the type of work where creating a Hemingway cliffhanger might be effective rather than burdensome. A few areas where I have found value in strategically unfinished creative work that requires creative momentum the Hemingway Special Processing certain admin tasks where momentum feels good and it's not urgent enough to create anxiety if it doesn't get done today. Brainstorming new ideas Think about how you might be able to experiment with these cliffhangers in your own professional life. I'd love to hear how it works for you. That's all for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something and I hope you'll share it with others. If you enjoyed this, you're going to love my first book, the Five Types of Wealth. You can pre order it now on Amazon or at the5typesofwealth.com as always, until next time, stay curious friends.