Traction Heroes Ep. 36: Blind Spots

You want to make better decisions to act more skillfully. But how? Seeing clearly is essential. It’s hard enough to get a good read on your context, but getting a good read on yourself is even harder. When it comes to self-assessing, we all have blind spots. In episode 36 of Traction Heroes, Harry brought a short reading that explores this idea. It’s from Phyl Terry’s Never Search Alone, a book that has helped people I know with their job search. But our conversation didn’t focus on job hunting. Instead, we explored what Terry calls Kahneman’s conundrum, after celebrated psychologist Daniel Kahneman: Kahneman says that he himself has no idea when he’s making any of the cognitive mistakes that he spent a lifetime identifying: ‘my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made the study of these issues.’ Whoops! Even the most prominent researcher on cognitive biases can’t effectively self-assess them. Terry…