Cognitive Biases

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. They are mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that the brain uses to simplify information processing and make decisions more quickly. While often useful, these biases can lead to distorted perceptions of reality and flawed decision-making. Here's a summary of 20 common cognitive biases and their effects on how we perceive our environment and make choices.

Biases Affecting Belief and Information Processing

These biases influence how we seek out, interpret, and recall information, often reinforcing our existing beliefs.

• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. This affects our decision-making by causing us to selectively gather evidence, leading to skewed perspectives and poor choices. For instance, an investor might only seek out news that is positive about a stock they own, ignoring any negative indicators.
• Anchoring Bias: The over-reliance on the first piece of information offered when making decisions. This initial "anchor" influences subsequent judgments. In negotiations, the first price suggested often sets the stage for the rest of the discussion, and in everyday life, the initial price we see for a product can make subsequent, lower prices seem like a better deal than they actually are.
• Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is most readily available to us. Events that are more recent, vivid, or emotionally charged are more easily recalled and thus perceived as being more common or likely to occur. For example, after hearing several news reports about a plane crash, you might feel that air travel is more dangerous than it statistically is.

Personal Change and Social Resistance - Chris Williamson

“You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you, because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they’ve seen, fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves.” - Gurwinder Bhogal

The Lonely Chapter has another perspective to it - as you grow, you don’t fit in with your friends, but this means that your friends don’t fit in with you either, and this causes a reaction from their side too.

The hardest part of changing yourself isn’t just improving your habits, it’s escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume.

Others don’t just remember who you were, they enforce it - which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison you can’t see.

Psychologists call this dynamic an Object Relation.

When people interact with you, they’re not engaging with you in your full, living complexity.

They’re dealing with the version of you that exists in their head, a simplified character built from fragments of memory and coloured by their own projections.

IF Kipling Played Golf

IF Kipling Played Golf

If you can dream of breaking par,
And master that dream by not then topping it off the first tee;

If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting,
For the slow foursome playing up ahead;

Or hearing lies, not give yourself to stating,
Your partner’s six was actually an eight;

If you can meet with Birdie and Disaster
(A 20 foot putt versus a ball lost in the trees),
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can trust your read when others doubt you,
And still two-putt, as you were meant to do;

If you can watch the swing you spent all winter perfecting,
Break apart and lose its flame,
And build it back by thinking “soft hands, weight left, body rotation”;

Then yours is the Course and everything that’s in it,
And, what's more, you’ll be a True Golfer, my friend!

© Parwinder Sekhon August 2025

Dating Essentials For Men - Dr Robert Glover

For most of his life, Dr Glover, the author of the groundbreaking No More Mr Nice Guy, was what he calls a "bad dater." He assumed the women he wanted were not interested in him. He believed that women disliked sex and thought men who wanted sex were bad. When he did get a girlfriend by practicing what he calls "Nice Guy Seduction," he typically hung on way too long for fear of having to enter the dating world all over again. But this all changed when he got divorced in his mid-forties. Dr Glover decided to approach dating as if it were a scientific experiment. To his surprise, he quickly found that talking with women, getting numbers, and getting laid was nowhere as difficult as he had thought. He often wondered what planet he had landed on.

Dating Essentials for Men was born of this experiment. Dr Glover has since taught thousands of men how to interact confidently with women and find the love and sex they have been seeking.

Are you ready to let go of the games, the tricks, the seduction, the pickup, the negs, the cocky-funny routines, the buying women drinks, the volunteering to help their sister move? Do you want to learn how to create the kind of authentic attraction that naturally brings women to you? If so, Dating Essentials for Men is the only dating guide you will ever need.

How to Control Your Cortisol & Overcome Burnout - Dr Andrew Huberman

In this episode, I explain cortisol and science-based protocols for properly setting your cortisol rhythm, which can significantly increase your daytime energy, focus, mood, and stress resilience, while also improving your sleep quality. Most people mistakenly think cortisol is bad, and many assume their levels are too high, when in fact many health and performance challenges simply stem from a disrupted cortisol rhythm. Getting your cortisol rhythm right can be transformative for your health and performance. I outline behavioural, nutritional, and supplement-based strategies to raise or lower your cortisol levels at the appropriate times of day and night. I also provide specific protocols for overcoming burnout. If you’re dealing with stress, low energy, hormone or sleep challenges, or simply want to optimise these for the sake of your physical and mental health and performance, this episode offers science-backed protocols to help.

Introduction to Cortisol and Burnout

Cortisol is a powerful lever for overall health and well-being, impacting mood, sleep, the immune system, and long-term well-being. While commonly associated with stress, cortisol's primary role is to deploy and direct energy to tissues, particularly the brain, for various demands, not just stressors. It releases glucose (blood sugar) into the bloodstream from the liver and muscles to provide this energy. Cortisol is produced in the adrenal glands and operates on a slightly slower timescale than adrenaline/epinephrine. Unlike adrenaline, cortisol is lipophilic, allowing it to cross the blood-brain barrier and act on receptors in the brain, especially in the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory. Burnout is a real condition, and understanding cortisol's role is key to addressing it. The goal is to achieve a high cortisol early in the day and low cortisol before and during sleep. If this rhythm is corrected, it can resolve issues like morning anxiety, low energy, and sleep difficulties associated with burnout. There are two main patterns of burnout: being stressed in the morning and exhausted in the afternoon, or being stressed at night and exhausted in the morning.

The Cortisol Rhythm and Its Regulation

I Hate The Way We Apologize - Charisma on Command

The Problem with Apologies

Public apologies are often perceived as insincere and forced, made under pressure to protect one's career, income, and social status. These apologies frequently do not lead to genuine feelings of improvement or significant change, and are often criticised as "phony Hollywood apology videos". The video highlights instances where public figures like Will Smith, Logan Paul, Kanye West, and Kevin Spacey made apologies under pressure, only to later contradict or disown them once the pressure subsided.

This issue extends beyond public figures into private life, where "fake apologies" are given and received, leading to no growth, empathy, or repair, effectively making them as useless as no apology at all.

Shame as the Core Issue

According to Joe Hudson, the fundamental problem with most ineffective apologies is shame. He explains that children are often taught to apologize by being told to do so, which makes it a transfer of shame, akin to a "shame hot potato".

The video uses the Will Smith slapping incident as a detailed example of this "shame hot potato" cycle:

• Chris Rock's joke about Jada causes Jada to feel shame.
• Will Smith, observing Jada's reaction, fears getting the "shame hot potato" for being a perceived bad partner.
• Will then unloads this shame onto Chris Rock by slapping him.
• Subsequently, social media places the shame back on Will (and Jada).
• A year later, Chris Rock, through his comedy special, redirects the shame back at Will and Jada.

The video argues that when society deeply shames individuals, it makes it more probable that the problematic behaviour will continue, as people either avoid the situation or perpetuate the behaviour, rather than transforming it.