Thinking on Thinking

What leads to you feeling successful ? Are they the things the same things that lead to you feeling confident ? This week, we continue the discussion from Episode 3, “Cognitive and Emotional Experiences & Models for Failure,” and discuss what events in our lives have led to feelings of confidence, how other people’s perceptions of us and those events influenced the feelings of confidence, and...

Is the way you do one thing, the way you do everything? It’s a common Buddhist saying but this week, we examine if it is actually true, and we talk about how we learn things: from the people around us, from practice, from exposure and from adapting models from culture. We also explore how persistence and learning are connected to our expectations of outcomes. This was a super fun conversation beca...

Why is pain helpful? How do we distinguish between different kinds of pain? How can we be cognizant of when we’re acting to protect ourselves, and when those protective instincts becomes routines that guide our thinking? And why does the world have so many golf courses? In this episode, Kahran and Divya discuss pain and the ecosystem that exists around it, both why pain is needed for learning, and...

What are the expectations of your audience? Can you support those expectations? Are those expectations uniform across the audience?  In this episode, Divya and Kahran begin by talking about the presumed expectations of their audience, but quickly realize they themselves have different ways of listening to podcasts. Divya is nearly as taken aback to hear that Kahran binges podcasts, as Kahran...

What does it mean to accept the data but not the feeling? How does our ability to accept failure influence our ability to do new things? What are better ways to fail? This week we explore different kinds of experiences, and how they shape behavior. We think about why it feels bad when we have failure, and the difference between accepting failure cognitively versus emotionally. We also think togeth...

How do we signal -- to the right people, with the right message, at the right time? How do we choose our in-group? We talk this week about signaling, what it means, how we do it, what feels weird when people seem part of the "us" group but also part of the "them" group, realizing your family in-group is not actually an in-group, aspirational signaling, signaling versus living your truth, and the w...

How do you think about success? What are the components of your success? This week, we explore how to construct a model for success, defining success, success ecosystems, how Divya would learn something new -- and be successful at it, how success-focused models can deliver in terms of achieving goals (but also warping intentions), and why achieving things sometimes comes with a sense of loss. We a...