it's the beginning of the year and many people that i've talked to many people that i've seen online comments about new year's resolutions and a very common comment that i've heard or that i've read is that it doesn't really matter when you set your resolutions that the first of january is like any other day and that really it's up to you it's up to you to decide uh to set your resolutions on any day that you decide to that there's nothing special there's nothing special about the new year and there's a part of me uh that used to believe this i used to believe that january 1st was like any other day and so reading these comments uh in the past was would have resonated with me i probably would have even shared the same sentiment in fact sometime on this show i may have shared a similar sentiment but the truth is i was wrong there is something to be said for a fresh start the author katie milkman actually did a study on this uh and she found that you are for example more likely to exercise after a birthday or the start of a week a month a year or a semester and the effect size there is fairly high 7 33 14 11 and 47 percent respectively um relative to the baseline and this is coming directly from the harvard business review article about this topic and the reason i want to talk about this today is not to harp on the fact that you might benefit from setting a resolution around the new year which you might and really any temporal landmark by the way uh is is a good time to make a change but instead to focus in on that misjudgment the likelihood that i would have supported the statement before i heard about this research and this is an experience that everyone has at some point in time our intuition leads us astray something we thought uh based on even our principled ideas based on what we believe about the world there's no difference in my mind between what happens on december 31st and january 1st but this is not actually true my principled thinking was incomplete and i needed to update my view of the world but here's the part i want you to focus on very often we use our base level thinking our principled thinking the the kind of derived thinking if you want to use it and use that that kind of term we use this fundamental ideas about the world and we use this as a kind of a basis for a given circumstance this happened to me recently we have a turtle tank in my house we own a turtle and the turtle has a filter to help filter the water in the tank and without getting too detailed i was trying to drain a little bit of the water out you're supposed to do this from time to time for aquariums and for for turtle tanks and the pump typically is responsible for the water that's in the tank and i incorrectly believed that somehow the pump itself was pushing water through this drain tube and based on this assumption i started to uh to diagnose the pump i was trying to understand what's wrong with the pump why is it not working and it turns out that the drain at the bottom of the pump has nothing to do with the pump itself it's entirely fed by gravity and you have to water out you ever wanted to hear about a turtle tank on a developer podcast but here we are and so this base level assumption that i had about how something worked around me how something was constructed what parts and pieces were necessary for the thing to function what needed to be true a lot of these basic assumptions about the situation turned out to be wrong however i use those basic assumptions to begin my diagnostics to try to fix the problem and to try to fix the problem and to try to fix the problem and to try to fix the problem i made some assumptions about what i knew quote was wrong versus what i knew quote was not wrong so why am i telling you about my turtle tank because you are probably making assumptions today about how the world works around you about how people work maybe even about how you work and those assumptions you've probably heard a million times on a hundred other podcasts to question your assumptions but it's very difficult when you are convinced that your assumptions are actually fact you're not opting into an assumption if it is something that you hold as a belief so perhaps in a new sense it's time to question your beliefs not just your assumptions your beliefs have a very thin line between a belief and an assumption and in fact you may have plenty of time to question your beliefs but you're not going to be able to do that if you're not going to be able to do that if you're not going to be able to do that if you're not going to be able to do that if you're not plenty of evidence that you've used to develop a belief i had plenty of evidence to develop my belief it turns out that i was incorrect about what the evidence actually meant because here's what happens when you don't question your beliefs when you don't question your beliefs that actually turn out to be assumptions you begin from a position where no matter how good your thinking going forward is the fundamental basis that you're using for that thinking is flawed i could have diagnosed the pump all day long i could have tried to make an argument about how fresh starts don't have anything to do with adherence to a new resolution i could have gone and and created a bunch of media about this that was of you know very high quality but the fundamental basis for that thinking that diagnostic the fundamental basis for the messaging all of it was flawed and so anything that came after it was subject to potentially being flawed not on its own in other words we could have tested the pump and the test would have been fine it could have been valid but when it's combined with the base assertion that you're making this is one of the most obvious kind of intuitively obvious reasons why having diversity of thought and diversity of background makes such an impact on the quality of your thinking assuming that your team has people that have a diverse set of thoughts and backgrounds and the reason for this is because they're going to make different assumptions than you do they're going to have different underlying principles for their thinking than you do what for you may be a very difficult thing to question because you're so convinced that it's true for them they may see through that thin veil very quickly and question it for you what i challenge you to do is to view all of those beliefs through the lens of science and what i mean by this is to instead of viewing your beliefs as fact view them as theory this means that it's possible for something to change that theory and sometimes we have theories that we use as if they are not correct but eventually if some evidence comes along that challenges the idea of your theory you can kind of hold it with loose hands you can update that belief so that you're not held captive by those incorrect base assumptions and spinning your wheels by doing good thinking on top of bad thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer t if you enjoyed this episode i'd i'd love to hear from you in the comments below and i'll see you in the next episode love to have you in the developer t discord community head over to developer t.com slash discord to join totally free today as you're starting out your new year i'd love to ask a huge favor of you um leave a review leave a review in itunes leave a review in whatever podcasting platform you use to consume the show we celebrated our nine year anniversary just 10 days ago as of the day of the recording of this the 11th on the day that this releases and i'll see you in the next episode of developer t discord community head over to developer t.com i'm ecstatic uh ecstatic to continue this show the most important thing to help other people find the show and decide to take a chance on it is a review from people who are already listening so that is a huge help a rating and a review thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea