Because painting was something new to me, I was afraid of making a mistake. This fear was compounded by the fact that the old owners had done a less-than-stellar job of putting up the paint that was there – color was splotched on the baseboards, the cabinets, and the ceiling. And I wanted this new coat to turn out perfectly. So I worried when the tape didn’t stick. I panicked when the walls looked streaky after the first coat. I winced when the old color was still visible after the tape was taken off.

Now? It looks great. Looking back on it, getting started was the most difficult part. The painting part was actually very easy and quite fun. Of course we made some mistakes, but those mistakes were easily fixed.

Lessons Learned:

• To cope with change, compare and contrast the current state versus the end result. When others are having trouble getting on board for change, communicate the big picture and long-term vision. Focusing on the end result—visualizing how much better the new color would look than the current color—helped me get over my apprehension quick!

• Worry during planning. Worry before closing the lid. Do not worry while doing the work. Stressing out about the outcome prevents us (and those around us) from getting into the flow of things. Do your best to foresee difficulties and plan for challenges, execute to completion without hesitation, then double-check for errors and evaluate areas for improvement. Fretting that the walls were going to be streaky prevented me from noticing how relaxing it can be to just…paint.

• Differentiate mistakes versus failure. Especially for those with perfectionistic tendencies, there is a fear of failure that results from thinking mistakes will lead to catastrophies. But failure usually isn’t fatal. Not all mistakes can be foreseen or avoided. Grabbing a mini brush and opening up a can of white paint fixed any error within minutes.

• You don’t know before you know. At one point, you never knew how to do anything, but you learned. Be patient with yourself if you are new at something; coach others through if they are struggling. Before the makeover, painting was not within my skill set. But pushing past the point of incompetence led to knowing how to do one more thing than I did last week.

Making a mistake (or twelve) is better than not doing the job at all. That sounds so obvious, but how often does fear stop us from doing something new? And how often do we worry about small details that we don’t have control over?

This post originally appeared on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog.

Chris and Dan sent me a copy of the book and offered to do an exclusive Q+A for this site. I would like to pay it forward and give my copy away now that I’ve read it. Here is the Q+A: I asked the questions, they provided the answers, and all the links in this article were added by me simply for convenience to the readers.

What inspired you to write The Invisible Gorilla? How long did it take and what was your writing process like?

We first started discussing ideas the book when we received the Ig Nobel Prize for our “gorillas in our midst” experiment in 2004 — the award recognizes research that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think.”  That’s when we began to realize that the “gorilla effect” was having a bigger impact on people than we had expected.  Our original experiment was intended as a study of selective attention and perception, but we think the gorilla video we created caught on largely because it forced people to confront their own flawed intuitions about how the mind works.  Unlike earlier demonstrations of selective attention, it was hard for people to rationalize why they missed something so glaringly obvious. And, when you miss something like a chest-thumping gorilla, it forces you to see that your intuitions about what captures attention and how much we notice in the world are fundamentally wrong.  As we thought more about the illusory belief that distinctive things automatically capture attention, we soon realized that many of the assumptions we make about the workings of our minds are wrong, and that those mistaken assumptions can affect all of us every day.

We began planning the book shortly after the award ceremony in late 2004, and gradually developed a book proposal over the next few years.

We sold the book in May of 2008 and finished the first draft of it in June 2009.  We spent the next several months revising before it was released in May 2010. So, the thought process, planning, and research for the book took quite a while, but the writing took us about a year.

During that time, we exchanged drafts of chapters and sections, editing and commenting on each other’s work, until we eventually reached consensus on everything. (Though we each have some words and phrases we might still change if it were up to us as individuals …)

The central theme of the book seems to be, Our attention is limited and our assumptions are flawed. What do you hope readers get out of this insight?

That’s just one of many themes in the book.  We would say that the central theme is that we hold mistaken ideas or intuitions about how the mind works and that those assumptions affect almost all aspects of our daily lives.  These intuitions reflect what we call everyday illusions.  Our goal is not to convince people that they are stupid or misguided.  Rather, we try to explain why we hold such flawed intuitions and what we can do about them.  By becoming aware of the many mistaken assumptions we all make about our minds, we can make better decisions at home and at work, and lead happier, safer, and more informed lives

You devote chapters to six everyday illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, causality, and potential. Why these six? Are there other cognitive distortions than these six worth noting?

We chose those six illusions because they seemed to fit together well. They relate to each other; for example, the illusion of confidence operates strongly when we think about the accuracy of our own memories (we think they are more accurate than they are) and when we think about whether people who claim confidence in their memories are reporting accurately about what happened (they aren’t as accurate as we assume they are). Our knowledge is often the most illusory when it concerns our understanding of the causes of things. And so on.

There are, of course, many other sorts of distortions, some of which we deliberately chose not to discuss (because they have been covered extensively by others).  The six illusions we chose also contain other, related illusions within them. For example, the illusion of cause encompasses both our difficulties in figuring out what causes what, and our tendency to assume that a single event (like the invasion of Iraq) must have had a single cause (e.g., the search for weapons of mass destruction), when in reality most events have multiple causes.

What advice do you have for people who want to know whether they should go with their gut or whether they should take a more logical approach to decision-making?

Our advice would be that you should trust your gut whenever a decision can’t benefit from additional analysis.  No amount of cogitation or deliberation will improve your opinion on which ice cream you like best or which potential date you find the most attractive.  In fact, careful analysis might actually lead to worse decisions when the basis for the decision is just an emotional response or aesthetic preference.  Our larger goal, though, is to identify cases in which our assumptions about our own minds might lead us to trust our gut when we shouldn’t. These are the illusions we write about.

In the book you are somewhat critical of other business books, especially Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. What are your thoughts on that?

It is unfortunately true that many business books come to erroneous, or at best unsupported conclusions because of the illusion of cause.

You simply cannot infer a valid general lesson from a single positive anecdote or collection of such anecdotes (e.g., companies that practiced some particular marketing strategy or management technique and were successful). You need a lot more evidence and analysis, as we explain in our book. We pick on Malcolm Gladwell mostly because he has published several high-profile books in this vein. We have written a more extensive essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The Trouble with Intuition” that gives our views on the dangers of relying too heavily on intuitions, something that people seem to have taken away from books like Blink (even when those books themselves are more nuanced). In a nutshell, we argue that the un-nuanced advice of “trust your gut” can be extremely dangerous when those gut instincts concern things like whether we are paying attention to as much as we think, whether our memories are complete and correct, whether we understand the causes of trends, developments, and events, and the like. Moreover, we think that some popular examples of the value of intuition turn out to be mere anecdotes that don’t withstand scrutiny.

This book has a very unique voice because it is based on your own research. What recommendations do you have for other academics or graduate students who want to write a mainstream book about their scientific research?

The biggest challenge in writing a science book for a general audience is recognizing what people find most compelling.  A book that talks down to readers or that tries to persuade with statistics won’t reach the widest audience, or have the maximum impact. We hope that our own book might serve as an example to aspiring writers of how social science research can be communicated accurately and also engagingly to the public.  We would even suggest that by understanding the many ways that people see, remember, and think about their world, authors can capitalize on everyday illusions to make their messages more compelling. We try to use anecdotes and stories to convey our message while backing the conclusions we draw with the experiments that underlie them.  Too many scientists try to use the experiments themselves to convey their message, but as we argue in the book, statistics are inherently less compelling than stories. We also think that it should be the job of academics and intellectuals to communicate their ideas and findings to the public, rather than outsourcing that job to journalists. As good as they can be at their craft, journalists rarely have the training or experience to fully appreciate how research is done and what it can mean. Researchers themselves might even enjoy learning a few new tricks of communication—writing The Invisible Gorilla was definitely an enjoyable learning experience for us!

Related Links:

http://theinvisiblegorilla.com
http://youarenotsosmart.com
VIDEO: TEDxUIUC – Daniel Simons – Counter-Intuition
The Invisible Gorilla: Are You Paying Attention to the Wrong Stuff? – Huffington Post

Please leave a comment that somehow pertains to this topic below if you would like the book. I will pick the winner on or before July 20th.

Your mind actually works very much the same way.

The first time you do something, it’s a lot of work for your brain. There is a lot of conscious effort involved. Just like a person walking through a forest for the first time, you are forging new territory, and creating a brand new path. When the same route is taken over and over, a clear path forms. Similarly, when you do something over and over, you create a habit.

The Easy Way or the Hard Way?

Your brain can process information automatically (the easy way) or it can think in a controlled manner (the hard way). When you go about your day using your mind the hard way, you are wasting precious mental resources. As a result, at the end of your day, you might feel exhausted and incapable of making even easy decisions. To avoid this, you want to use effortful processing as infrequently as possible. The more activities you can automate, the less they exhaust your precious mental resources. That means you have enough brain power to get the more important things done.

Automate the things you know you need to do

Create strong habits so you can take the guesswork out of the equation for your necessary tasks. Make your own predictable processes around the mundane tasks you must do, so you can do them automatically, without wasting your mental energy. We have a finite amount of energy to get things done each day.

Are you optimizing your energy or wasting it mindlessly? Once you have this down, help others around you do the same.

This post originally appeared on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog.

To read the rest, go here. I wrote it as a guest post for Matt Cheuvront’s blog, Life Without Pants (yes, it’s work safe). Matt has rounded-up about a dozen of the most brilliant bloggers to do a series on the inconvenience of change during the month of May. To read my views on why change is so difficult, take a look at The Psychology of Change.

Here’s the trick. I visualized the classroom and then associated each word with a particular object in the room where I would be taking the test. So for example, I visualized the clock above the chalkboard and thought about my vocab. word “recalcitrant”… I pictured the word on the second hand, on the minute hand, as a logo on the clock, and printed in a circular text instead of the numbers. Then I imagined, “resisting authority or control, hard to manage or operate” – and I gave this attribution to the clock. For example, the clock is recalcitrant because one has to get a step stool to change the battery when it dies. Whatever, it doesn’t have to be perfect. When it came time to take the test, all I had to do was look around the room and both the words and definitions popped into my mind. If you’re relatively creative, you can do that with any word and any object.

I still use this trick today. If I want to remember something but can’t write it down, I’ll think of an object that will be around at the time I want to remember, and merge the two together in my mind. So for example, if I want to remember to bring a book to work with me the next day, I’ll picture the cover of the book as a big poster on my refrigerator. The next time I see my fridge, the book, as well as the fact that I wanted to pack it in my bag, pops into my mind.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, that trick is a way of enhancing your long-term memory’s storage-and-retrieval process. It works much better and much faster than memorization by repetition. You store the information when you associate the two unrelated objects. You retrieve the information when you encounter the tangible object. Just as a multiple-choice test is easier than an essay test, you are basically making things easier by taking something that requires a recall function and turning it into recognition task.

Just to name a few, you can do this with remembering people’s names and birthdays, making a mental to-do list, or giving a presentation without notes.