Why People Stay the Same
Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero
Eddie Pinero
4.9 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2020
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode I discuss a concept from Daniel Kahneman's book "thinking fast and slow," where he states that people are far more interested in protecting themselves from losses than they are in pursuing opportunity.
Without realizing it, we spend our entire lives in protection mode. This manifests itself in the form of optimistic denial, as Tim Ferris puts it. Since we are so concerned with preserving and maintaining the status quo we invent reasons to avoid the discomfort of change...we live to stay the same.
But what if we didn't? What if we could teach ourselves to become aware of this phenomenon and cut through the excuses and procrastination we're so accustomed to? In this episode, I dive into exactly that question.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Your World Within Daily. I'm Eddie Panero. |
| 0:04.0 | In this episode, we're going to talk about fear, and more specifically how human beings are risk-averse. |
| 0:09.0 | We fear losing what we have more than we're excited about pursuing what we don't. So this week I was reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. |
| 0:30.6 | And it was an interesting book. |
| 0:32.8 | It's like an encyclopedia of information. |
| 0:35.7 | And I want to share with you, I guess, the central theme and then a very specific idea |
| 0:41.0 | that has to do with fear and human decision making. |
| 0:44.5 | So the idea, long story short, in the book is the human brain has two systems. |
| 0:51.5 | What he calls system one, which is sort of the automatic, you know, primal |
| 0:56.6 | decision-making system. We do things without even realizing, right? Someone snaps, you hear |
| 1:01.4 | something and you turn your head. It's automatic. You're not really thinking about it. You're |
| 1:05.0 | reacting. And then system two, which is the system that we think we use to make all of our decisions, right? |
| 1:11.8 | It's reason and logic and when we really weigh things out and focus. |
| 1:18.6 | But his point is most of our decisions are actually system one, and we don't realize it. |
| 1:27.1 | And we actually get into trouble because we make these decisions based on system one. And we don't realize it. And we actually get into trouble because we make these |
| 1:30.1 | decisions based on system one thinking that, you know, there's actual logic and reason behind it, |
| 1:36.0 | but there's not. And so one example he talks about is human beings being risk averse, |
| 1:43.9 | how our natural tendency, without even realizing it, |
| 1:48.1 | is to avoid pain, avoid loss over reward or opportunity or upside. We'll always be more inclined |
| 1:58.3 | to protect what we have, to avoid losing than we are to chase |
| 2:02.8 | something that will better ourselves or change our lives in a positive way. |
| 2:08.3 | And so he uses a few examples, few experiments. |
... |
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