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Accidental Talent — On the accident of talent

• [article] Affordance Competition — 14 Mar 2026
  The brain prepares multiple action plans simultaneously and the environment biases which one fires, via salience, practice, goals, and urgency. Design the competition and you design the behaviour.
• [article] On Motivation — 15 Sep 2025
  We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the <em>content</em>: what things motivate us. Then there is the <em>process</em>: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that <em>maintain</em> our motivation.
• [article] Anticipation beats reward — 31 Jan 2025
  Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.
• [article] Addictive Work — 24 Jan 2025
  The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.
• [article] Motivation pt. II: Stickytaping it all together — 6 Dec 2024
  We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the <em>content</em>: what things motivate us. Then there is the <em>process</em>: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that <em>maintain</em> our motivation.
• [article] Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies — 29 Nov 2024
  Individually, the disconnected dichotomies of intrinsic vs extrinsic, normative vs motivating, ‘cognitive’ and ‘biological’, and the like have little utility. But when you put them together, you can get some quite juicy fidelity on why people do what they do.
• [article] Mechanical success vs nepotism and luck — 1 Nov 2024
  We usually complain about systems ‘getting in our way’, with arbitrary criteria that determine success. But this goes the other way too. Much of my success and that of those around me is similarly mechanical. Not luck, effort, or nepotism.
• [article] Solving the say-do-gap — 12 May 2023
  To close the say-do-gap, we need to feel some ownership of the problem, we need the social support to support the change, and we need to know how. Anything less will make us focus on how good thinking about changing feels and not actually putting in the work.
• [article] A Science of Discontent — 31 Oct 2022
  We regularly create ‘psychic predators’, choosing to concentrate on the uncontrollability of events or concentrating on events we can’t control. A far better way of approaching this is to exercise our ‘psychic muscles’.
• [article] Our success is not our own — 23 Jun 2022
  The success of the people we surround ourselves with directly influences our performance and sense of accomplishment. It’s worth paying attention to how we balance this, both with those more successful but also those less.
• [article] The origin of insight — 20 Feb 2022
  Lightbulb moments are one crucial key to creativity, and though they appear elusive, there are many ways to encourage the happy accidents that bring them into being: we must bring together the unfamiliar and the familiar.
• [article] From Zero — 13 Mar 2021
  Hydraulic despotism is the idea the critical resources are used to control populaces. Once, water. Now tech. To counter this, we should learn to recreate more basic systems from scratch, fostering self-reliance and innovation.
• [article] A narrative of 'grit' — 16 Jan 2021
  Angela Duckworth’s concept of the personality trait ‘grit’ is an interesting one, but it’s actually rather less helpful than the narrative about success she weaves in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
• [article] Genetics is nurture — 11 Jan 2021
  How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much because of our environment? This tension is made complicated by the fact that the dichotomy doesn’t really exist. Rather, our nature is a form of nurture.
• [article] The nuance in Maslow's Hierarchy — 23 Dec 2020
  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of these ideas that’s regularly misapplied both inside and out of academic circles. Which seems ridiculous, because there isn’t much to it. And yet, properly understood, it’s a powerful tool for encouraging personal growth and success.