Work & Career
Being new at something in public
The discomfort of visible incompetence is what stops most people learning after about thirty, and it is largely a misreading of the audience.
Nadia Okonjo
32 articles by Okonjo
Communication
Small talk, and what it is for
Widely dismissed as empty, and it performs a function that nothing else performs.
Work & Career
Changing direction mid-career
The obstacles are more practical and less psychological than the genre suggests, and the practical ones are addressable.
Goals & Motivation
Intrinsic interest, and where it comes from
The advice to follow your passion assumes interest precedes competence, and the evidence generally points the other way.
Communication
Conversations with people you disagree with
Persuasion by argument works less often than it should, and the approaches with better evidence are mostly about asking rather than telling.
Confidence
Self-compassion, without the softness
A construct with a reasonable evidence base and a name that puts people off, whose main finding is that self-criticism does not work.
Focus & Attention
Attention and anxiety
Worry consumes the same capacity that concentration requires, which is why anxious people struggle with tasks they are entirely capable of.
Habits
The advice industry and how to read it
Self-improvement writing has a structural incentive to overstate, and a handful of tests separate the useful from the confident.
Goals & Motivation
Comparison to your own past
Progress is invisible from inside because the reference point moves with you, which is why records matter more than memory.
Communication
Email, messages and the response time problem
The expectation of near-immediate response is an unstated norm rather than a requirement, and it is doing considerable damage.
Confidence
Handling criticism that is partly right
The hardest feedback is not the unfair kind. It is the kind that is unfair in its framing and accurate in its substance.
Focus & Attention
Working memory is the actual constraint
The number of things you can hold in mind at once is small and fixed, and most productivity advice is really about not exceeding it.
Habits
Decision fatigue, and what survived the replication crisis
A popular concept whose headline studies did not replicate well, and a residue of practical advice that holds up for other reasons.
Goals & Motivation
Long projects and the middle
Beginnings have novelty and endings have deadlines. The middle has neither, and it is where most long efforts are abandoned.
Communication
Disagreeing productively
Most workplace disagreements are unproductive because the parties are arguing about different things without noticing.
Confidence
Failure, and what it is reasonable to learn from it
The instruction to learn from failure is sound and considerably harder than it sounds, because the obvious lessons are frequently wrong.
Focus & Attention
Context switching between roles, not just tasks
Moving between work and home, manager and maker, is a switch with a cost that nobody schedules for.
Habits
Sleep is the intervention nobody wants to hear about
It has the largest effect on mood, attention and self-control of anything discussed on this site, and it is the least popular recommendation.
Work & Career
Career decisions with incomplete information
You cannot know whether a job suits you before doing it, which makes the decision a question of information gathering rather than of insight.
Confidence
Perfectionism, and the two kinds of it
High standards and fear of failure are different things that get the same name, and only one of them is a problem.
Confidence
Comparison, social media and the reference point problem
People assess themselves relative to whoever is visible, and what is visible has changed considerably.
Focus & Attention
Reading, retention and the illusion of learning
The study techniques that feel most effective are consistently the least effective, and the ones that work feel like failure.
Habits
Routines, rigidity and the difference between them
A routine that only works on a perfect day is not a routine. It is a set of conditions you are hoping for.
Goals & Motivation
Rewards, and when they undermine the thing
The claim that external rewards destroy intrinsic motivation is stronger than the evidence, and the conditions where it holds are worth knowing.
Communication
Giving feedback that changes something
A large proportion of feedback produces no change at all, and the research suggests fairly specific reasons why.
Confidence
Confidence is a consequence, not a prerequisite
Self-efficacy research is clear about where the belief comes from, and it is not from being told you are capable.
Focus & Attention
Multitasking, and what it actually costs
The brain does not run two demanding tasks at once. It alternates, and the alternation is where the cost sits.
Work & Career
Burnout is not just tiredness
A specific occupational phenomenon with defined components, frequently used as a synonym for exhaustion, and responding to different things.
Goals & Motivation
Goal setting: what the evidence supports and what it does not
Specific difficult goals do improve performance under conditions that are frequently absent from the situations people apply them to.
Confidence
Impostor feelings: what the research actually says
A widely reported experience, a contested construct, and a set of responses that work better than reassurance.
Focus & Attention
What actually restores attention
Concentration is depletable and recoverable, and the activities that recover it are not the ones people reach for.
Focus & Attention
Deep work is a schedule problem before it is a discipline problem
Most people who cannot concentrate have not failed to concentrate. They have never been given an uninterrupted hour.