Speaker B explains how false proxies like TikTok views or typing speed hijack your attention and crowd your mental dashboard. The fix: define the specific change you want, then pick meaningful indicators that actually measure progress toward it.
How can someone train their minds to think more strategically for the long game, especially in a world with shiny objects?
I don't know if you've talked about false proxies before. A false proxy is something that is easy to measure but not useful. How many TikTok views you got yesterday is a false proxy. How fast a programmer can type in words per minute is a false proxy. These are easy things to measure and not helpful. When we think about what is on our mental dashboard, is it coming from the watch on your wrist? Is it coming from the sales force? What are you doing that's cycling? The world keeps pushing false proxies in front of us because they're trying to hack us. The New York Times sends me an email, breaking news, and then the thing they're listing is not breaking news. It's obvious that that was going to happen, but they have to call it breaking news because we've established that if the New York Times says breaking news, we have to look at it. We can insulate ourselves from these things and we can decide what is the change we seek to make and what are the indicators that will tell us that we're on the right path.
The Library of Minds: Brain Coach: How to Stay Sharp When AI Does the Thinking | Jim Kwik
