This is Stevea Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

I've been doing executive coaching for a long time.

That's where I work with an executive to help them navigate tricky problems,

develop stronger leadership skills, understand their business better, and so on.

Often, we strategize about how they can handle tricky situations

with other people. One of my clients will be having trouble with Charlie, and I ask,

have you talked to Charlie about the problem? And they say, well, I mentioned it to Ashley and

Ryan and Skyler, McKinsey, Leslie, and Carrie, but no, I haven't actually talked to Charlie

about it. And I say, talk to Charlie.

Why haven't they ever talked to Charlie? Well, long, long ago, our lives were short and brutish.

If you met another proto-human at the watering hole, they might pound you over the head with a stick

until you were dead, just like in 2001 a space odyssey. So gradually, we evolved the ability to figure out what's going on in other people's brains.

This ability is called Theory of Mind. In other words, your theory of what's going on in their mind.

Even though our adorable little tykes learn to say no by the time they're three,

theory of mind is much slower to develop. Like it used to take 15 to 20 years, and now that we

have digital natives who spend their childhood clicking the like button instead of interacting

face-to-face, it probably takes 25 to 30 years. According to the research of MIT Professor

Rebecca Sacks, Theory of Mind even has its very own brain region. It's

about the size of a dime. So our dime-sized theory of mind is trying to figure out what's going on

in someone else's full-sized brain. You can imagine it's going to have to take some shortcuts.

Remember that Theory of Mind came from wanting not to get hit on the head by a stick, so when

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