After about 5 months of very slow reading, I recently managed to finish Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Honestly, I think this book will become a Bible of sorts for me.
It crystalizes so many vague ideas I’ve had and also gives me new and valuable perspectives.
Such as Kahneman’s concept of “the two selves.” Let me illustrate this with something else that’s meaningful to me, and that’s Werner Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man.
This is a documentary about a guy who traveled up to Alaska summer after summer.
He camped out in the wilderness, living in a tent, and recording hundreds of hours of video of himself, of the tall grasslands, of the beautiful rivers, and of the troupe of grizzly bears that hung out all around him.
The grizzlies and the video guy eventually developed a mutual respect for each other.
He got closer and closer to them, and more and more in touch with nature.
It was becoming quite transcendent. Until one lean summer night, when a hungry grizzly bear came into the guy’s tent and, during a horrific and terrifying few minutes, ripped him apart and ate him.
Shocking story.
And a good illustration of Kahneman’s two selves.
One self is the “experiencing self.”
It’s how we feel, moment by moment. The grizzly man’s experiencing self got many thousands of moments’ worth of peace, beauty, excitement, and self-discovery.
The other self is the remembering self.
It’s how we evaluate or judge our experience in hindsight, or from a removed perspective.
The grizzly man’s remembering self, if it could put the pieces back together, would probably remember the one emotional high point of his Alaska summers — maybe the time he managed to get close to a mamma bear and her cubs — and the tragic end — the late-night bear mauling.
So why am I telling you this?
Well, I personally find I consult my remembering self too much, both when evaluating how I felt, and in making big decision about the future.
There’s no getting around the remembering self — it’s an essential part of all of us.
But it’s only one half of the tango.
The experiencing self should have something to say too.
And as I hope the grizzly man story above illustrates, the two selves can often come to very different conclusions.
Anyways, maybe this philosophical rambling will be useful to you in some way.
Now it’s back to the mundane world of direct response money-making. And if you have a business and you need some help with that, both your remembering and experiencing selves might appreciate the following experience: