#3usefulthings — #2 — About language, friendship, and money
#3usefulthings is a series of small blog posts with short overviews of some interesting and useful facts. Previous issues: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6.
This week I’ve finished a book about the brain mechanisms of self-control and self-discipline. It had a lot of great references to the different experiments and studies. I’ve heard about some of them before but didn’t think about them together in such a perspective.
1) Young people tend to save more money now if they are shown with “old” images of future selves. Here’s the original paper. It sounds reasonable: people are frightened to see themselves old and start thinking about the future.
What’s more interesting: the effect works only for a part of people. Some of them accept their “old” images as other people, not as themselves. So they don’t really care and don’t start saving their money.
Another study mentions that people whose native languages have specific forms of future time (like Chinese or Estonian) are more likely to save their money and avoid bad habits. Because of the construction of their language, these people don’t separate the present from the future and tend to care about their future more. This study is relevant to a thought that your language defines how your brain works and how do you accept reality. It reminds me of a great novella Story of your life written by Ted Chiang, which inspired the creation of the Arrival movie.
2) Robo Advisors. Talking about saving money for the future. After watching a lecture from one of the recent tech conferences I’ve discovered a blog of one of the payments companies who is developing a product (aka robo advisor) which not only helps to decide where to invest your money but also do that for you, re-configure your investment portfolio and deals with the legal part (and that’s awesome).
What’s even better — such services avoid human bias. To know more about such products, you can listen to an episode of How I built this podcast (Eng), or read this article on Habr (Ru).
3) Doing things with your soulmates could drive to a great result. A great story of the friendship between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, who created a lot of amazing software at Google and were drivers of some great products like MapReduce and TensorFlow.
Maybe you’ve heard memes about Jeff and haven’t heard about more introversive Sanjay. They are different, but their collaboration is a kind of magic. They could do pair programming for hours and constantly talk, never being stuck.
Hopefully, you had such an experience with your peers, when you complement each other and make your common work 10x times better than it could have been done separately.
