There are a series of tools which act as mindset hacks for us as individuals. I would like to call them 'Intuitive pumps'. - [[#Intuitive Pump One: You Keep Growing|Intuitive Pump One: You Keep Growing]] - [[#Intuitive Pump Two: Gorilla in the room|Intuitive Pump Two: Gorilla in the room]] - [[#Intuitive Pump Three: Hamster On the Wheel|Intuitive Pump Three: Hamster On the Wheel]] - [[#Intuitive Pump Four: Kitchen as a Laboratory|Intuitive Pump Four: Kitchen as a Laboratory]] - [[#Intuitive Pump Five: 2-minute Lazy Tasks|Intuitive Pump Five: 2-minute Lazy Tasks]] - [[#Intuitive Pump Six: Pale Blue Dot|Intuitive Pump Six: Pale Blue Dot]] ###### Intuitive Pump One: You Keep Growing Have you heard of the growth mindset? It's a simple mindset hack that forces us to step back and [[How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset#^e0fa36 | ask ourselves some simple questions]]. *You could ask yourself, for instance, what have I been told I'm really good at? You should also ask yourself, what have I been told I'm really poor at, that I'm just not good at?* ###### Intuitive Pump Two: Gorilla in the room Take the example of being the 'gorilla in the room'. It's a form of a cognitive pump where you imagine yourself to be this huge, fist-pounding gorilla heading to give a talk on the stage. This cognitive pump has given me an imagery that makes me feel strongly confident before I enter the stage for any talk. ###### Intuitive Pump Three: Hamster On the Wheel I've had this bad track record of leaving a lot of Whatsapp messages read, delivered and not replied to. Even though I do end up reading the message, there is a higher inertia to reply to them sometimes. Whenever the inertia gets the better of me, I tend to get into the 'hamster in a wheel' mode. Here, I am texting and replying in burst mode as fast as possible to all the messages at once. This is again a cognitive pump. ###### Intuitive Pump Four: Kitchen as a Laboratory Treating the kitchen as a laboratory means adopting a scientific mindset towards cooking and food preparation. It involves applying the principles of experimentation, observation, and analysis to enhance culinary skills and create innovative dishes. In the kitchen laboratory, chefs can experiment with various ingredients, techniques, and flavors to understand their properties and how they can be combined to create delicious meals. Some ways in which the kitchen can be treated as a laboratory include: 1. Controlled Experiments: Chefs can isolate variables by using identical ingredients but altering one element at a time (e.g., changing the cooking temperature or substituting an ingredient) to observe its impact on taste, texture, or presentation. 2. Record-keeping: Like lab notebooks, chefs can maintain detailed records of their experiments - noting ingredients used, measurements, cooking times, and observations. This helps in analyzing results and making improvements. 3. Observations: Chefs can carefully observe how ingredients transform during cooking processes such as boiling, baking, or frying. ###### Intuitive Pump Five: 2-minute Lazy Tasks All of us have experienced this: we might have had a very small task (not important, not urgent) which we keep delaying upon. It keeps getting snoozed indefinitely until we almost never make it. Take the example of removing dust from the ducts of the cooler. I almost always don't do it. However, if I shift my mindset by saying this to myself: 'It only takes two minutes, what's the harm?', I might actually get it done. Most of these tasks that get snoozed indefinitely almost always take just two minutes. So why not just do it now? ###### Intuitive Pump Six: Pale Blue Dot In the end we're all just a pale blue dot. ![[Pasted image 20230723231358.png]] The above image is the photograph of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers. In the image, Earth appears as a tiny, pale blue dot surrounded by darkness. The quote suggests that in the grand scheme of the universe, our planet and everything on it are insignificant and small. It serves as a reminder of our place in the vastness of space and can evoke feelings of humility and perspective. This is a very helpful cognitive pump to detach ourselves from the myopic perspective of the everyday life and to take a very far-sighted viewpoint on reality as a whole. In the end, nothing ever matters.