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"Three Times Wiser" is a newsletter about big ideas, mental models, brain bugs, and principles of wise thinking.
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Subscribe here for more insights and never miss an update:
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Your brain is already being rewired. The first thing to get straight is that neuroplasticity isn't a special mode you switch on. It's the default. Your brain changes with everything you repeat. If you check your phone two hundred times a day, you're training a cue-response loop with real dedication.
So "neuroplasticity" alone tells you almost nothing. Saying "the brain can change" is like saying "the company has a P&L." The question isn't whether your brain is being shaped. It's who picks the inputs. For most people, the environment, notifications, the org chart, the incentive scheme pick.
Self-directed neuroplasticity simply means choosing some of those inputs on purpose and repeating them enough to matter.
There are for simple steps to self-directed neuroplasticity:
- Relabel. Call the urge what it is. "This is an obsessive thought. This is a compulsive urge."
- Reattribute. Put the urge down to the brain, not to reality. "It's my brain sending a false message."
- Refocus. Do something else, something constructive, for at least fifteen minutes, while the urge is still there.
- Revalue. Over time, see the urge as having little value. Not something to obey, not something to fight. Just noise.
So "neuroplasticity" alone tells you almost nothing. Saying "the brain can change" is like saying "the company has a P&L." The question isn't whether your brain is being shaped. It's who picks the inputs. For most people, the environment, notifications, the org chart, the incentive scheme pick.
Self-directed neuroplasticity simply means choosing some of those inputs on purpose and repeating them enough to matter.
There are for simple steps to self-directed neuroplasticity:
- Relabel. Call the urge what it is. "This is an obsessive thought. This is a compulsive urge."
- Reattribute. Put the urge down to the brain, not to reality. "It's my brain sending a false message."
- Refocus. Do something else, something constructive, for at least fifteen minutes, while the urge is still there.
- Revalue. Over time, see the urge as having little value. Not something to obey, not something to fight. Just noise.
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Source: nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewconten…
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¹ Want to support me? Subscribe on X & to my newsletter threetimeswiser.substack.com
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Spend two weeks writing down every piece of friction you run into or watch someone else run into. Don't fix anything yet. Just log it.
At the end of the two weeks, look for repeats. Pick the one that happens most often and affects the most people. Estimate, roughly, how much time it costs per month. Being off by half is fine. You only need to know whether it's 2 hours or 200.
Fix that one thing, properly, at the layer where it keeps happening. Then tell people it's fixed, and tell them roughly how much time it gives back. That last step matters more than it should. Invisible work stays invisible unless someone makes it visible, and you're the only one who knows it happened.
Repeat.
At the end of the two weeks, look for repeats. Pick the one that happens most often and affects the most people. Estimate, roughly, how much time it costs per month. Being off by half is fine. You only need to know whether it's 2 hours or 200.
Fix that one thing, properly, at the layer where it keeps happening. Then tell people it's fixed, and tell them roughly how much time it gives back. That last step matters more than it should. Invisible work stays invisible unless someone makes it visible, and you're the only one who knows it happened.
Repeat.
Keep a friction log. It doesn't need to be a formal one and you can just write a note on your phone or a text file. Now, every time something wastes your time or someone else's, write it down. After a few weeks, patterns show up. The things that recur are the things worth fixing. One-offs usually aren't.
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The most practically useful thing a sleep tracker does is catch illness before you feel it.
Anyone who has worn a tracker for a year probably has a story like mine: a morning where the temperature reads +0,6 °C, resting heart rate is 6 beats above baseline, and you feel completely normal. Then you're in bed with a cold by the following evening.
What I've learned from this is boring and useful. Cancel the intensity session on the morning of the signal, not the morning of the symptom.
Anyone who has worn a tracker for a year probably has a story like mine: a morning where the temperature reads +0,6 °C, resting heart rate is 6 beats above baseline, and you feel completely normal. Then you're in bed with a cold by the following evening.
What I've learned from this is boring and useful. Cancel the intensity session on the morning of the signal, not the morning of the symptom.
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Keep a friction log. It doesn't need to be a formal one and you can just write a note on your phone or a text file. Now, every time something wastes your time or someone else's, write it down. After a few weeks, patterns show up. The things that recur are the things worth fixing. One-offs usually aren't.
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In practice most people experience their job as a queue of tasks. Tickets come in, tickets go out.
And the multiplier question ("Why does this kind of ticket keep coming in?") only occurs to you if you step out of the queue long enough to look at it. And most queues are designed, accidentally, to never let you do that.
And the multiplier question ("Why does this kind of ticket keep coming in?") only occurs to you if you step out of the queue long enough to look at it. And most queues are designed, accidentally, to never let you do that.
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A manager's output is the output of their organization plus the output of the neighboring organizations they influence.
The logic doesn't care about your title. Anyone whose work changes how other people work is operating on that equation.
Say you're a warehouse team lead. Every morning your pickers spend about eight minutes hunting for a handful of SKUs that were put away in the wrong zone during the previous night's receiving. You have twelve pickers. That's 96 minutes of labor a day, or roughly 400 hours a year, lost to one bad putaway habit.
You can be a very fast picker yourself and cover the gap. Or you can spend two afternoons working with the receiving shift to fix the putaway rule, relabel the bins that cause confusion, and add a scan check at the end of the night.
The first option makes you look good. You're visibly productive, you're the person who "always gets it done." The second option makes you disappear for two afternoons, and if it works, the problem simply stops existing.
If the arithmetic is that obvious, you'd expect everyone to work this way. But the issue is that nobody notices a problem that stops existing.
The logic doesn't care about your title. Anyone whose work changes how other people work is operating on that equation.
Say you're a warehouse team lead. Every morning your pickers spend about eight minutes hunting for a handful of SKUs that were put away in the wrong zone during the previous night's receiving. You have twelve pickers. That's 96 minutes of labor a day, or roughly 400 hours a year, lost to one bad putaway habit.
You can be a very fast picker yourself and cover the gap. Or you can spend two afternoons working with the receiving shift to fix the putaway rule, relabel the bins that cause confusion, and add a scan check at the end of the night.
The first option makes you look good. You're visibly productive, you're the person who "always gets it done." The second option makes you disappear for two afternoons, and if it works, the problem simply stops existing.
If the arithmetic is that obvious, you'd expect everyone to work this way. But the issue is that nobody notices a problem that stops existing.
The single most important truth a manager must understand: your output is not your output.
Andy Grove gets the starting point right in "High Output Management":
"A manager's output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence."
Some people measures themselves by how many emails they answered and meetings they ran.
But if you spent the whole day busy and the warehouse shipped the same number of orders at the same error rate, your output that day was zero.
The day felt productive but it really wasn't.
Some activities affect a lot of output, and some affect almost none. This is leverage.
A one-hour session where you fix how the receiving team logs discrepancies might change ten thousand transactions over the next year. A one-hour meeting where you approve a purchase order changes one.
In practice, exceptional operators are ruthless about this distinction.
The mediocre operator is often more visibly hardworking. The exceptional one looks a bit underemployed some days. That's because they've built the system so it doesn't need them for routine decisions, and they keep their attention for the places where it moves something.
So the first test: list what you did last week and mark each item by how many future units of work it affected.
geni.us/73BGLqG
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You want a quiet life with a garden and three friends? Great. Do you have it? No? Then something isn't working.
And the something-isn't-working it’s a gift because it’s actionable. It drags intelligence out of the realm of identity and into the realm of practice.
And the something-isn't-working it’s a gift because it’s actionable. It drags intelligence out of the realm of identity and into the realm of practice.
The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.
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How to become good at anything? Pick the thing. Find the fastest honest feedback you can buy, build, or bully into existence. Operate at a difficulty where you fail roughly one attempt in six. Make failure cheap enough that you can afford a lot of it and real enough that it still stings. Stay there for an embarrassingly long time. Decouple your sense of self from any individual attempt, because the attempts are data and you are the model, and the model does not get offended by data.
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This is an interesting ratio: time to construct understanding ÷ time that understanding stays valid.
When it's below 1, you can know things. When it's above 1, you can only ever be catching up.
But what’s even more interesting is to know what do people do when they can't build models fast enough?
Well, they rent them. They take borrowed coherence from whoever is selling it: ideology, tribes, influencers, vibes. A pre-assembled worldview is a coping mechanism for a broken ratio.
When it's below 1, you can know things. When it's above 1, you can only ever be catching up.
But what’s even more interesting is to know what do people do when they can't build models fast enough?
Well, they rent them. They take borrowed coherence from whoever is selling it: ideology, tribes, influencers, vibes. A pre-assembled worldview is a coping mechanism for a broken ratio.
The problem of our time is not merely information overload. It is that the time required to construct a coherent understanding of reality is becoming longer than the time during which that understanding remains valid.
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"Gram per gram, even when sitting comfortably, you are converting 10,000 times more energy than the sun, every second."
geni.us/osFjY
geni.us/osFjY
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Each deliberate departure from what you would do by default costs something.
That cost is attention, friction, sometimes a relationship, and the time it takes to set the thing up.
If you try to override everything, you spread that cost so thin that none of it does any work.
People who are good at this seem to spend their overrides on a small number of things where the default path leads somewhere bad and the impulse is predictable. They accept their impulses almost everywhere else.
That cost is attention, friction, sometimes a relationship, and the time it takes to set the thing up.
If you try to override everything, you spread that cost so thin that none of it does any work.
People who are good at this seem to spend their overrides on a small number of things where the default path leads somewhere bad and the impulse is predictable. They accept their impulses almost everywhere else.
The greatest ability you can learn is the ability to consciously override your impulses.
It's about the ability to sit down and work when every impulse is screaming to do something else.
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There are two kinds of pain, and one of the most useful things you can learn is to tell them apart.
Always choose clean pain over dirty pain.
Clean pain is the pain of telling the truth. The pain of leaving. The pain of disappointing someone. The pain of starting. The pain of being bad at something new. The pain of saving money instead of buying the thing. The pain of going to bed while the party continues. The pain of facing the blank page.
Dirty pain is the pain of avoiding clean pain. The pain of staying too long. The pain of lying. The pain of living above your means. The pain of being known inaccurately. The pain of watching your life shrink around a fear you refuse to face. The pain of managing the consequences of cowardice.
Clean pain is often sharp and brief, dirty pain is dull and chronic.
Self-respect is paying the clean cost early.
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