If you’ve found yourself questioning the “go with your gut” advice, perhaps you will be interested to hear more from someone who advises doing just the opposite.
I spoke with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky about why his new book, “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters,” advocates ignoring your natural instincts when it comes to making business decisions.
His book is about using cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics to avoid mistakes in your business. I was especially interested in the idea of cognitive biases, the term for decision errors that are made simply because of how our brains are wired.
Here are a few simple thoughts that came out of the conversation:
- Don’t wait for your gut to tell you when you’re ready - just start the work. Even if it turns out to be bad work, you’re helping yourself develop the habit of exercising your brain and creativity
- What’s comfortable isn’t necessarily good
- Our primitive instincts and intuition were not built for our modern environment
Dr. Tsipursky’s disaster avoidance expertise has helped him to find counterintuitive techniques that can be used to combat cognitive biases. While all types struggle with them, we focused on several cognitive biases that are common to many creatives. Absence blindness (or what he calls survivorship bias) is one that I was especially curious about. This is the idea that a person is unable to value what they can’t see. What effect does that have on the value of creative work if the client doesn’t understand the process?
Dr. Tsipursky shares his personal experience with absence blindness. Not understanding the time and skill that it would take to design a 40-page booklet, he hired a graphic designer at an unrealistically low rate. The quality of the final results matched the price tag. If the graphic design process were valued or better understood, Dr. Tsipursky and his partner may have chosen to pay more for quality work and not have had to spend their own time to redesign it.
Want to know more:
1. Listen to the podcast here. http://marketingmentor.libsyn.com/
2. Find more information about Dr. Tsipursky’s studies, learn about how changing your physical habits can change your mental habits, and many more insights DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com
3. Get the book: Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters
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