A few weeks ago, I started reading a fascinating book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
I usually move through business books quickly and zero in on
the few ideas that seem applicable. I suspect
most business books are intentionally designed to be consumed in this manner. They’re “sugary” and easy to digest knowing
the attention span of the readers (me included) is relatively short.
So it took some courage for Kahneman to write a 500-page book full of substantive content that is fairly difficult to understand. I’ve been reading for a couple of weeks and I’m only 20% finished! I recently picked up a couple other books to read in parallel because this one is going to take while, and I don’t want to rush through it. If I did race through it, I feel like I’d miss a bunch of great insights.
To provide some background, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002. Since Kahneman is a psychologist (not an economist), it was unusual for him to win this prize. In fact, he was the first non-economist (by profession) to win this award. He won the prize for developing Prospect Theory-- a behavioral economic theory that describes the way people chose between alternatives that involve risk.
Studying Prospect Theory would be beneficial for anyone in the real estate profession (I can’t think of a Nobel-prize-winning topic more applicable to the day-to-day work of a real estate agent), but the topics we’ll be discussing in future WorkPuzzles will focus more on the psychology of making decisions and forming judgments. Here is quick summary of what we’ll hope to learn:
In his best selling book, Daniel Kahneman will take us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from recruiting your next agent to diagnosing what causes some of your agents to consistently make the wrong choices—each of these can be better understood by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us (and those we manage) into trouble.
Tomorrow, I’ll share some specific insights concerning some of Kahneman's ideas and how they apply to recruiting. In the future, I'll occasionally revisit this topic with new insights and ideas that apply not only to recruiting, but also coaching and personal performance as well.
If you want to read the book on your own, the Kindle version in a great bargain (only $4.99 on Amazon) right now. Also, there are several summaries of this book available if you’re more of the “cliff-notes” type of person.
Regardless, I believe there is a lot learn from Daniel Kahneman’s manifesto. Writing from a near 80-year-old’s perspective, he has much wisdom to share.
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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.
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