Tip of the Month: April 2007

From Mastery of Learning

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

We all know people who become habituated to the way that they do things. When we become habituated to a particular way of doing something, we tend to collapse things together. One example of the way we collapse things is that we think that worry is a part of preparation. We think that if we are serious about something, we—and everyone else involved—need to make worry a part of the preparation. We become habituated to worry because it has correlated to our success in the past. We confuse correlation with causation.

Worry may be helpful in certain circumstances. Most of the time, it reduces our intellectual and emotional bandwidth. It limits the options that we are able to see. It makes it less fun.

Take some time and investigate to see if worry really needs to be a part of preparation. Make the distinction between correlation and causation. Don’t worry, be happy!

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