🍹 Bless You

KRA sent me this on Valentine’s Day:

I mean, we’re all about boldness here, but this was built different.

Here’s a crazy idea, GoK: Maybe channel this energy and creativity into ensuring public funds go toward.. you know.. the public?

In bringing Kessentials to life, it was necessary to enlist the talents of people who are way better at what they do than I could ever hope to be. Our ancestors adopted specialization for a reason, and I wasn’t about to pretend I could animate reels.

Off to my contacts I went, considering friends and acquaintances who’d shown proficiency in various relevant areas. Maybe I don’t have a diverse enough circle because that exercise was futile, sending me to Upwork instead.

My first job posting was looking for someone to create a logo and a thumbnail. I got about 15 applicants (you hot commodity, you), a quarter of who were women.

Some Pakistani guy had boosted his proposal and even offered to charge me $5 below my offer. But something in my head flagged that as suspicious, so I went down the list of proposals looking for something that didn’t cause the imaginary alarm bells to go off.

I eventually hired Bhavisha, a talented artist who did an amazing job creating the images now synonymous with Kessentials. The twisted part? She initially bid $5 over my offer. 👀

They probably taught this in Econ class during one of the times I skipped school. But a more likely explanation was a flaw in my thinking that convinced me women were more trustworthy than men.

It worked out, but I may not be so lucky next time, so I decided to vumua those twists.

Let me start with a fundamental truth: We’re all biased. Our life experiences shape our worldviews, resulting in our likes, dislikes, and alarm bells.

While striving for objectivity in judgment is vital, I think it’s naive to aim there without first recognizing our innate prejudices. So, for example, if someone expressed their type, it’d be wrong to form a character assessment of them solely based on that preference.

Back when wearing animal skins was en vogue, partiality served humans well. Heck, it’s partly responsible for our being here today. Our ancestors could identify the poisonous apple and recognize tribes out to get theirs.

Like other beneficial traits, this pickiness got transferred from generation to generation, taking on various forms as time passed.

I needn’t tell chops like yourselves that discrimination has gone into overdrive, what with the -isms and -phobias proliferating our world. It may serve us well to abandon tools that safeguarded us but now are just making our and other people’s lives sucky.

Biased thinking is just one of the numerous mind traps (or mental hiccups, if you prefer) hard-wired into our fallible monkey brains. Some MeHs I’ve caught in my life include the spotlight effect, the gambler’s fallacy, the paradox of choice, and the sunk cost fallacy.

Escaping Ordinary artfully unpacks the four above and more, revealing how susceptible we all are to them. I’ll let him do the heavy lifting here because, well, specialization. It’s a two-parter; you can find both I and II on YouTube.

Just as it’s difficult to stop hiccups, it’s nearly impossible to turn off the switch that brings these mind traps to the fore. However, being aware of them helps us catch ourselves when we’re about to fall.

Maybe the result is a better ability to notice when people are selling you something you don’t need. Perhaps you’re a better judge of character. Maybe you’re less likely to believe scented vape will help you quell your nicotine cravings. All I see is win, win, win.

(Trying to be) Objectively yours,

Kessentials.

I can see it already, your bewilderment at my titling a post about hiccups “Bless you.“ As no widely accepted word or phrase is offered to those hiccuping incessantly, let's agree to give “Bless you” that job, sawa?