Real talent tend to underestimate just how good they are (Dunning-Kruger effect)

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” - Bertrand Russell

Source: http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/06/the-dunning-kruger-effect-why-the-incompetent-dont-know-theyre-incompetent.php

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Zeigarnik Effect

"If we don’t finish a task, there’s mental tension. This mental tension keeps the unfinished task more prominent in our memory, whereas completion of the task provides closure, and a release of the tension. This is what is known as the Zeigarnik Effect."

While dining in a restaurant, Zeigarnik noticed that the waiters were quite capable of remembering multiple orders that were being processed, but once the orders were complete and the food was served, the waiters forgot about those orders.

Zeigarnik wondered why, so she set up a series of experiments to uncover the reason.

Source: https://powermore.dell.com/business/how-to-use-the-zeigarnik-effect-to-stop-procrastinating/

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Multitasking

"There’s this myth among some people that multitasking makes them more productive" - Zheng Wang

"People seem to be misperceiving the positive feelings they get from multitasking. They are not being more productive - they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work."

Source: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm

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Premature optimization is the root of all evil

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.  - Donald Knuth

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People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

Jeff Bezos said in a conversation with 37 signals that in his observation people who were right a lot of the times were people who often changed their minds.

He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.
He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.


Source: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3289-some-advice-from-jeff-bezos

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