Tag: Wendy Wood

Introducing Your Second Self

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If you get anything out of this blog, I’d be very grateful if you could chuck us a few quid. Thanks!

I recently finished reading Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits and I thought I’d share a little more and introduce you to your own ‘second self’.

‘The world of habit is so self-contained,’ Wood writes, ‘it makes sense to think of it as a kind of second self – a side of you that lives in the shadow cast by the thinking mind you know so well.’

The distinction between these two ‘selves’ will be familiar if you’ve ever read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, where he describes the differences between System 1 (automatic) and System 2 (attention) thinking.

But where Kahneman is resigned to the incorrigibility of human error in System 1, Wendy Wood celebrates the superhuman strengths of our second self and urges us to harmonise our two selves or systems.

This is an idea with a long, if partially forgotten, lineage. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) William James declared:

‘The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.’

Both selves have strengths and weaknesses, but Wendy Wood argues that for too long we have ignored or maligned the second self:

‘If our noisy, egotistical consciousness takes all the credit for the actions of our silent habitual self, we’ll never learn how to properly exploit this hidden resource. Habits will be a silent partner, full of potential energy but never asked to perform to their fullest.’

It’s time we got to know our second selves.

Introducing David and Dave

So I have two selves: isn’t this great news? To get away from total confusion, let’s call them Dave and David.

Until now, David has been the all-conquering, egotistical genius taking the praise for everything this body accomplishes. As far as David is concerned, writing these words is an act of sheer will alone – the finely tuned composition and typing habits of Dave have nothing to do with anything. David is the ego-self, or Kahneman’s System 2.

In contrast, Dave goes about his business quickly, quietly and easily – automatically, in fact. Dave is the second self or Kahneman’s System 1.

We know almost too much about David, so forget him for a minute (he’s throwing a strop already). What, according to the science so far, are Dave’s strengths and weaknesses?

Let’s start with the weaknesses because that’ll keep David happy for a second:

Dave’s Weaknesses

  • Unobservant.
  • Completely thoughtless and utterly uncritical.
  • Heavily dependent on familiar cues, he’s a total fish out of water in even a slightly different context.
  • Can’t react to changing events and will carry on executing the same orders, regardless of whether the result is actually useful any more.
  • Can suck the fun out of anything, even the most exquisite romance, by sheer repetition.
  • Can’t set his own conscious goals.

Doesn’t Dave sound like an idiot? Yes he does, but stop judging and let’s look at his strengths for a second.

Dave’s Strengths

  • Can’t be bribed with rewards. Can’t be punished either.
  • Doesn’t need willpower to resist temptation: simply executes. Almost impossible to distract.
  • Utterly committed to delivering relentlessly, effortlessly, day after day after day, through good times and bad.
  • Cheap to run. Doesn’t guzzle calories like profligate David does.
  • Very chilled. Dave doesn’t panic, worry or ever get confused about what to do
  • Actually thrives in times of stress or when the body is tired, hungry, sleep deprived.
  • Incredibly fast – so fast that action comes before even thought (Dave is Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast’).
  • Waaaaay tougher, stronger and more resilient than weeny David.
  • Highly skilled. It’s Dave who can play guitar, speak pretty good English, chop vegetables with a sharp knife, and ride a bike (although not all at the same time) (yet). Dave can be trained to do almost anything.
  • Makes life feel meaningful (say what? for real – this is Dave’s domain)
  • Although Dave might not set goals initially, it’s Dave who achieves my goals and, through his repeated actions, ends up deciding what I value. Mind blown.

Dave sounds like a total LEGEND!

Not one, but two of Wendy Wood’s studies (2002, 2005) found that 43 percent of our behaviour is automatic. If that figure is anywhere near accurate, then the sooner David lets Dave strut his stuff, the better it’ll be for both (?) of us (!).

As Wendy Wood concludes in Good Habits, Bad Habits, working in harmony with our second self isn’t only more productive, it’s also ‘a simpler, more integrated way to live your life.’

We all live habitually already. Most of us just aren’t aware of it. And because of that, we’re ignoring a big part of who we are and why we do what we do. We’re also ignoring all the many ways we could be doing things better.

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? The value of persistence in writing

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? It’s a question that goes back to an Isaiah Berlin essay and one that helped Malcolm Gladwell determine that he was destined to become a journalist, not an academic.

A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.

The distinction is wafted at, but totally unexplained, in this slightly unhinged profile of Gladwell in the Independent. The most interesting thing Big Malc says is when he’s asked whether he has ‘a gift’ for writing:

[I]f someone worked really hard could they write like me? Yes. But it’s a bit like saying, if someone worked really hard they could have your personality. My writing is who I am. Is good writing available to a larger group of people than we think? Absolutely. But the amount of work that goes into my writing… The last piece I did was 12 drafts, and if you write 12 drafts, I guess it’s going to be a pretty good piece, but how many people will do 12 drafts?

It’s not a style; it’s who you are. It’s not a gift; it’s hard work.

Which brings me neatly onto…

The value of persistence in comedy writing

I’m currently reading Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wendy Wood, one of the world’s leading social psychologists. She describes one piece of research that shows how we consistently underestimate the power of persistence.

At Northwestern University, Brian Lucas and Loren Nordgren asked a group of comedians to come up with as many punchlines to a setup as they could in four minutes.

Then they had to stop and tell the researchers how many more ideas they could come up with if they carried on for another four minutes. Typically, the comedy writers reckoned that they’d come up with fewer ideas after the break.

But when they were forced (presumably at gunpoint) to work for another four minutes, the comedians actually came up with more ideas than they expected—almost as many as in the first burst of creativity.

Lucas and Nordgren’s follow up studies showed that we particularly underestimate the value of persistence for creative tasks. In one experiment with over two hundred participants, the responses generated while persisting with the task in the second time period were significantly more creative than the responses generated initially.

The well doesn’t run dry, it runs deeper.

You can read a nice summary of Lucas and Nordgren’s work here. I’ve doubled the duration of my work sessions from 45 to 90 minutes.