Final Post

One of the interesting subjects for me was the topic of intuition and confirmation bias. We have all had right and wrong intuitions in different matters, but we have to be careful not to make decisions solely based on our instincts. It’s amazing that how as rational beings we make many of our judgments based on our feelings, and any evidence that supports our hunches seems credible to us automatically, as we tend to ignore any contradictory evidence. For instance, If we have a good feeling about a new system, a project or even our personal relationships, even if we get warning signs of early troubles, we usually tend to interpret the evidence in our favor and pretend like everything’s going well. A wrong intuition and overconfidence in our feelings can lead to erroneous decisions.

My favorite book was Drive by Daniel Pink. The subject of motivation is always engaging to me since being motivated to enjoy my job is a constant problem for me. I get tired of any job and task easily. Even an activity that I consider my favorite hobby at one point, will become a nuisance after some time. The introduction of this book prompted me to read the related article in the Reader more closely. What I liked about the book was dividing intrinsic motivation into three elements of autonomy, mastery and purpose. I believe at least one of these three elements was missing in all the jobs I’ve held in the past few years. Whenever I liked the task in my job, due to the supervisors' micromanagement, I didn’t have enough autonomy to perform the task the way I wanted, . When I was working as a computer programmer, I had the autonomy and purpose, but unfortunately didn’t see the capacity in myself to improve - and without enough motivation I left the field of computer science indefinitely.