Critical Mass

Definition

In nuclear physics, critical mass is the minimum amount of a given fissile material necessary to achieve a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. A subcritical mass is a mass of fissile material that does not have the ability to sustain a fission chain reaction. You can think subcritical mass as a waste, in a sense that you didn´t achieve the reaction you wanted. A supercritical mass is a mass in which there is an increasing rate of fission. In your purposes, you should understand that all the excess material or effort after the critical mass is reached is wasted. Sometimes supercritical mass can cause more troubles than good results.

Critical mass can be described as a point at which something, for example, an idea or a virus, is dominant enough to grow, or sustain, a process, reaction or adopting new technology. Critical mass has many other names like, the tipping point, the minimal effective dose, break-even point, etc.

Hard to know when critical mass is achieved

It is pretty easy to know when you have enough critical mass in physical reactions before they happen. When it comes to real life everything is much harder. Most often, these moments can only be determined afterwards. When the critical mass is reached, the reaction will accelerate quickly. Most often, it is hard to stop the reaction until the acceleration changes into deceleration of the reaction. For example, the flu is unstoppable in every flu season. After the critical mass of people become sick, the flu is unstoppable until it has reached its peak. This point of no return is very hard to define, if not impossible in many cases.

Critical mass (Tipping Point) in social epidemics

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book called Tipping Point, which describes the three rules of social epidemics which are:

1. The law of the few: All the social epidemics have some people with the special set of social skills involved. These people have vast social networks, are trusted by others, and willing to share their information with them.
2. The stickiness factor: All the sticky messages have some common characteristics: they are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and are told through stories.
3. They are spread through the right environments: These environments are usually optimal for spreading epidemics.

When all these three rules are working at the same time, you have better possibilities to spread your ideas for other people. If one of these things are missing, reaching the critical mass of people is improbable. To reach a tipping point, social epidemics are spread through the combinations of many psychological tendencies like social proof and availability bias.

Critical mass of expertise/skill

Critical mass of expertise or skill is reached only after you have had enough deliberate practice. On average, this takes thousands of hours and many years, depending on the amount of competition and talent you have. In highly competitive fields, like popular sports, for example tennis, most people will never reach the critical mass of skill. This point can be enough income from tennis to be a professional. In working life, critical mass of expertise may help you to get into the point where you become irreplaceable. Then you can have a possitility to choose how much you work, when you work and to whom you work for. At this point, we have many choices to choose from and no one else to tell us what to do. Most people never reach this point.

Minimum Effective Dose (MED)

The minimum effective dose is the amount of work, medicine, and resources, that will produce the desired outcome. In medicine, all the extra dose may produce unintended and unwanted consequences for the human body. If you look at the packaging of the medicine, you see many warnings about side-effects like headache from the medicine you use for feeling or getting better. Without reaching the MED, you cannot get better and using medicine becomes a wasted effort. You can also have many things you really don´t want to do, but you have to, like cleaning the house. MED is the amount of cleaning needed to have your house clean enough for you to live in. The amount of cleaning should be the amount that the most vulnerable of the people who live in the house can stay healthy.

Critical mass is one of the most important models in the latticework. But, in order to understand it better, you need to understand more models.

Peak, Anders Ericsson
4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss
Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

-TT

Reactions

Definitions

You can find some definitions for a reaction. In chemistry, reaction is defined as ”Reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another.” When you talk about human reactions you can define it as ”Something done, felt, or thought in response to a situation or event.

Reactions have many orders of effects

Sometimes it is easy to see the effects on a reaction. One reaction may cause a chain of reactions where all of the outcomes are very hard to notice. Any action or behavior has many positive or negative effects or consequences. All the action you take should have more positive effects than negative. This doesn´t happen all the time. When you are making decisions, you should try to understand all the effects they have on your life and to the other people and your environment. Most people focus on the first order of reactions or consequences, but it is too simple. In almost any decisions, there are some consequences of the consequences and you shouldn´t ignore them.

Lets think about practicing a skill. You can assume that positive effect is you get better, when the practice is done well. You can also assume that when you  start from a scratch, you start enjoying the practice more, which is the positive side-effect. The negative side-effect of the first order positive side-effect may be that when you get better, you may need better equipment, which costs money. The Negative effect of practicing a skill may be the need to hire a coach to learn the basics of the particular skill, which costs money. This may have a positive side-effect of learning the skill faster than learning on your own.

Reactions have delays

One reason why people make mistakes in finding causes for some reactions is they see some consequences which are actually consequences of the consequences of things happening way before they can be seen. For example, some doctor prescribes some medicine for the pain in the back of a patient. This will relieve some pain, and a patient may feel fine for a while until the pain comes back even stronger. I am no doctor, but to me this looks like a situation where the real cause could be something like a wrong way of sitting in front of the computer and the effect of the real cause was delayed or formed through time.

The more complicated or bigger the system is the longer the delay can be. For example, most of the countries that have dominated the world with their military or through trading have eventually lost their position. The real causes are hidden beneath the surface of things looking very well, and it may take decades before the position is lost. When youeat the symptoms, things may look good for a while. But the underlying problems are still there and after the delay the symptoms may be lot worse.

A complicated world has many unintended reactions 

When you think about the effects of the effects of reactions, but there will still be some unintended consequences. Youve in a complicated world where it is hard to see how everything relates to each other. Even the smartest people cannot see all cause-effect relationship in their lives. We should keep this in your mind when you are thinking about the consequences of some things you want to do. You should never be so sure about your actions whatever you are doing. For example, developing a habit of working hard for your physical appearance. This can have an unintended consequence of having an unhealthy relationship with food or not spending enough time in recovering phase of your performance cycle, which can cause serious injuries or health problems. The unintended consequences are always there. Most of them do not need serious consideration, but some of them do. For example, in buying some cheap items they do not normally matter, but they probably matter in the expensive ones.

When your latticework of mental models is good, you can find some interactions of the consequences better than without a proper latticework. If you only have some separate mental models, we cannot prepare for the consequences as well as we can with the proper latticework. Improving mental models and understanding their interactions better will give you a competitive advantage

Sources:

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufmann, Charles T. Munger
The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge
Early Retirement Extreme, Jacob Lund Fisker

-TT

Simplicity

Simplicity

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

• Steve Jobs

Definition

It is basically impossible to find one definition for simplicity. Most of the English dictionaries offer different definitions. You need to define it many ways. First, simplicity can mean something that has no complicated parts or complicated details. Second, the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do. Third, it can be defined: The quality or state of consisting as few parts as possible.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more simpler.

People are the most smartest living things in this planet and also the most complex ones. The world is so complicated that even the smartest experts have trouble in understanding their own discipline. Complexity has created enormous amounts of waste to everyday life. To reduce the waste you have to simplify your life. Simplifying should not go too far, because some of the complexity is necessary to be as effective as possible. Increasing complexity has a critical mass, in which the cost of added complexity exceeds the usefulness of extra complexity. Everybody needs to find this point in what they want to achieve.

Oversimplifying is not going to give us the results you want. You cannot be depended on one thing only, not in any part of your life. Keeping things too simple, believing there is only one solution or factor that has an effect on any bigger thing is a major cause for many failures. You can see lots of experts with excellent reputations believing in a single factor in big things like growing multibillion dollar businesses, for example, technological competitive advantage as an only source for growing Apple.

You should simplify with using simple rules and systems. You can add simple rules into your life, like do not eat after 10 pm. There can be rules for anything in life. It is pretty easy to invent the rules, but it is harder to apply them all the time. Therefore, you need systems like habits, skills, or some decision making systems, which make complex things simpler. Systems have normally less waste. You have to remember that systems are created from different parts. The amount of parts should always be minimal for the reason the system which is created and these parts should also be as simple as possible.

Multitasking: doing a shittier job, and being happier about it

People live in societies where the myth of doing many things at once is a sign of success. This is a wrong assumption and has no scientific base. Brains can do only one task at a time. What really happens is that when you are ”multitasking” you are rapidly changing from one task to another. Every time you do it, there is a cost. You get less efficient every time You change your task. What really happens in your brain is that multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop. This loop rewards your brain for losing focus and keeps it looking for external stimulation. Because of this loop, you get empty rewards from getting hundreds of small tasks done. The opportunity for multitasking is enough to harm your cognitive performance. What really happens is that you get more satisfaction for doing a shittier job.

You have also some metabolical costs from multitasking. Changing tasks makes your brain to burn up oxygenated glucose which is the same fuel for keeping your focus on tasks. Fast and continual changing from one task to another causes the brain burn the glucose so fast that you feel disoriented and exhausted after a short while. You have used all the nutrients in our brain. Your cognitive and physical performances suffer from this. You use a lot less energy, when you are focusing on one task at a time. All the changes in your tasks are also decisions. In multitasking, you don´t even recognize it. Decisions deplete your neural and physical resources too. Little decisions appear to use as much of your neural resources as the big decisions. You should arrange our environments in a way that your possibilities for distractions are as small as possible, especially, when you are doing the most important tasks of the day.

Information overload comes with too many parameters

There is always a maximum amount of information you can process within a period of time. Increasing the amount of information over this limit, you cannot function in the most efficient way. Human brains evolved in an environment, in which the amount of information was minimal compared to the World you live in.The capability of your brains is limited. The maximal amount of parameters, which can be either attributes of choice or the number of alternatives, is ten. After that limit, the quality of the decisions gets weaker. There is not so much difference after ten paramaters have been reached. It doesn´t really matter if there are over ten or even twenty different parameters or alternatives. There are many ways to reduce this number. For example, you can apply systems, in which the amount of alternatives have been reduced before, we even start making a decision.

All this is just a tip of an iceberg about the power of simplicity. It is hard to simplify your life and all the other related actions to an optimal level of simplicity. Everyone would do it, if it were simple, but it is easier to have too much simplicity or complexity. All the masters of their fields of expertise are able to get close to optimal level. Most people cannot do it and they live their lives with lots of waste, whether it means about using their time or efforts. Reaching an optimal level of simplicity should be goal to all of us. It is a skill you should try to learn.

Sources:

Poor Charlies Almanack, Peter D. Kaufmann, Charlie T. Munger
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin
Insanely Simple, Ken Segall

-TT

Inertia

A definition of inertia: An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force to change the direction or starting a movement.

Objects, persons, and organizations resist changing their direction or resist changing their ways to act. Non-profitable organizations will probably stay below zero unless there will be a change in the company culture or its business and overweight persons will probably eat too much crap and exercise too little in the future unless there will be a force which changes things like a doctor who tells the patient he/she will die soon if there is no change in the exercising and eating habits.

Resistance to change conserves energy

You are naturally resistant to change. It is your brain´s way of conserving energy. It is programmed that way, because when brains were developed, people lived in a hostile neighborhood and survival was the only thing that mattered. It probably still is in your genes, but your survival is not a big deal every day anymore. Conserving energy was one of the best ways of staying alive. Most often, you do the same things again and again, day after day and week after week. All of this is happening in your unconscious mind. What actually happens is that your brain is fighting the change all the time. It does not want to make any changes, because the energy needed stays lower. Change is your brain´s worst enemy. It fights it any way they can. Your brains sabotage your change until you have succeeded to overcome the resistance on the whole. You need to push the change through with a lot of conscious effort or you will fail.

Changing how you work and improving in it need to be fought through your consciousness. Otherwise, chance of changing is low. You hear and think ”this is the way you have always done things” explanation when you or somebody else want to change things to the better. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is one mental model all of us have that should be changed. All people should remember that the only lasting thing is that things change around you and doing the same things in the same way all the time doesn´t help you in adapting to change. The best time to overcome the resistance to change is when you are on top of our performance cycles. The worst time is, when you are at the bottom. New year´s resolutions have probably the worst possible timing to overcome the resistance to change.

Discipline is nothing, habits are everything

When you are relying on discipline instead of habits, your brain is using more energy. This is a reality you cannot change. Discipline is harder in the long run than having habits. Brains have a certain amount of energy to use for the day. It is basically impossible to stay disciplined through the whole day without having any habits to conserve energy. Discipline can be improved, but there are some natural limits even for the most disciplined people. Energy conservation through habits helps you to focus on the most important things and execute them better.

Habits have the same kind of chains in your nerve fibers than skills. The more you execute the habit the more powerful the chain of nerve fibers becomes. The more repetition you have the harder it comes to change our habits. Each repetition compounds in your brains. Most of your habits are executed through your unconscious. You don´t even realize we do things. Depending on the sources, 40-90 per cent of your actions are habits. This means habits have a bigger role in your life than you think. Getting better habits leadsyous to better success, better ways of life, and a greater well-being.

Habits basically have three components: Trigger, Routine and Prize. You have no habits without the whole chain. Your habits are combinations of these three components. You have just conscious actions. Trigger or a clue is anything from stress to the clues in your environment like logos of a chain restaurant. Routine is the action itself like eating a hamburger. Prize is the real reason why you execute the action. It can be anything from a hormonal change to a strong emotion. If you were watching a brain scanner, you would see a small spikes in our brain waves it while seeing the trigger for the habit and a lot bigger spike during having the prize. After the habit has developed fully, there is no way of getting rid of it. The only thing you can do is to avoid the trigger or change the routine if the trigger cannot be avoided. This will take lots of conscious effort and time. It is not impossible, but the time varies from weeks to months depending on how many repetitions we have done.

The ability to overcome our natural resistance for change and good habits are two building blocks for a great life

Without the ability to overcomey our natural resistance to for change, you do not succeed as well as you could. The only permanent thing in the world is change. You have trouble in adapting this fact. Your world will definitely look different in ten years, but you may have not changed at all. It is not easy, but necessary. All the great performers in their own fields have adapted to change. Good habits conserve energy and lead to better skills and better life, when their effect is bigger on you than your bad habits´. Think about your habits and try to figure out which kind of effect they have on your life.

Sources:

Superhuman by Habit, Tynan
The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy
Be Excellent at Anything, Tony Schwartz
Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin

Have a great week!

-TT