🔺 Imagine you are on a train. Strangers are sitting around you. You want to have the most enjoyable experience possible from the ride, and you have two options: talk to strangers, or withdraw into yourself. Which do you choose?

🔺 For most of us, the answer is clear: we withdraw. Who has the patience to talk to strangers we know nothing about? They might bore us. Besides, maybe we want to get some work done, or listen to music, a podcast, something.

🔺 The act of predicting what will make us happy is called affective forecasting in psychology. We are constantly predicting how all sorts of big and small things in life will make us feel.

🔺 Researchers at the University of Chicago turned a commuter train into a laboratory for affective forecasting. They asked passengers to predict which of the two options would give them a more positive experience. Then they instructed one group to talk to a stranger and the other group to remain silent and isolated.

🔺 At the end of the ride, passengers were asked how they felt about the trip. Before departure, most predicted that talking to a stranger would be unpleasant and that withdrawing into themselves would be much better. But the actual experience proved otherwise.

🔺 Most passengers who struck up conversations reported a positive experience and said their train ride was better than usual. Even those who normally spent train time working said their productivity was not reduced by chatting with strangers.

🔺 Many studies like this show that humans are poor at affective forecasting—not only in short‑term situations like this train experiment, but in the long term as well. And this weakness seems to be most pronounced when predicting the benefits of human connection. One important reason is the undeniable fact that human relationships are often messy and unpredictable.

🔺 The issue is not necessarily that we are introverted, but that we sometimes want to avoid the potential chaos of interacting with others. Yet we tend to overestimate that chaos and underestimate the benefits of human connection: we focus too much on potential costs and dismiss the potential benefits as trivial or nonexistent.

📕 The Good Life by Robert Waldinger

💎 Stephen Robbins, in his book 53 Principles of Managing People, writes: One management consultant, who specifically studied the management of military forces, noticed that police officers during their shifts would get into the car assigned to them every morning, drive to the highway of their mission, and spend the entire workday driving back and forth along that highway.

🔹 Clearly, this aimless patrolling had little to do with the core duties assigned to the police.

🔹 In his review, the consultant realized that the performance and efficiency of police officers in that city were measured by the distance they drove each day.

🔹 As a result, officers drove long distances back and forth daily, without making any meaningful contribution to public safety.

🔹 This real story reminds us that when we evaluate and reward employees in a stereotypical way, and forget to reward the behaviors we truly value, employees eventually turn to superficial and routine behaviors.

🔹 Consequently, despite offering various and even abundant rewards, we find that employees lack motivation for major tasks and keep themselves busy with trivial, everyday work.

🔹 In such situations, we must always seek to change the organization’s reward system, knowing that even small adjustments can lead to extraordinary results.

🔹 The importance of reward systems became even clearer to me when one of my wealthy relatives told his adopted son: “Don’t worry about making money! When I die, all my wealth will be yours.”

🔹 As it happened, this relative lived for a very long time, and throughout his old age he never understood why his adopted son had no interest in preserving his health.

🔹 When he brought this up with me, I replied: “Because you are rewarding your son for your death, not for your life.”