Operant Conditioning

Your capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn faster than the environment changes.

Malcolm Knowles's principles of adult learning: self-direction, experience as resource, readiness, problem-centered orientation, intrinsic motivation.

Amishi Jha's research: attention is a finite, depletable, but trainable cognitive resource — short daily mindfulness measurably improves it.

Approach a situation as if you knew nothing.

Unusual or bizarre material is more memorable than common material.

Hierarchy of cognitive learning: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create. Benjamin Bloom, 1956 (revised 2001).

Sales forecasts under-set to ensure attainment bonus.

Innovation borrowed from the immune system — distributed sensing, rapid response, memory of past attacks.

Status tiers and points push consumption beyond actual need.

Judging only results ignores ethics of process and rewards shortcuts that look like wins.

Money flows after ecosystems collapse, not to protect them in advance.

A negotiation between conscious goals and the unconscious 'positive intention' behind a problem behavior.

The relative valuation we place on rewards now vs. later — and how steeply we discount.

We favor people who are similar to us or who like us.

Start from the desired future and work backward to the steps that make it inevitable.

Temporal illusion where the first moment after a fast event seems stretched.

Issuers pay raters who compete for the highest ratings.

Emotional states distort cognition and decision-making.