Blog

Tag: Behavioral

The Peak Bias

Why Consistency Gets No Respect

One of the most interesting examples is to look at any average person debating whether Jordan or LeBron is the GOAT. They will inevitably bring up Jordan’s 6-0 finals record as if Jordan only played in the NBA for 6 years. LeBron’s 4-8 record on the other hand is somehow worse than if he never made it to the finals at all (which frankly doesn’t make sense lol). This isn’t really about basketball though. It’s about a fundamental bias in how humans evaluate performance where we disproportionately value peak moments over sustained consistency, even when the consistency represents equal or greater total value. ...

January 25, 2026

You Can Be Both

Great Engineers Learn to Play Politics

I recently saw a post arguing that exceptional people are rare because they’re so focused on their craft that they skip “bureaucratic bullshit” and “often left other skills to rot”. I left a comment explaining that it’s a 50/50 situation. In this piece, I’ll expand my take on this more in depth. Exceptional people comes in different shapes and forms. Pretending that someone can’t be exceptional simply because they learned to deal with the “bureaucratic bullshit” feels like a weird stereotype. (If anything, this reads like the exact type of mentality that gave birth to the “10x engineer” meme lol.) ...

December 12, 2025

Communicating Effectively

Why empathy wins

It’s a common problem at work where you see a problem but you’re having a hard time trying to convince people to support your attempt at fixing it. Worse still, they might not even see it as a problem (or they don’t think it’s something that warrants any attention from anyone). I’m approaching this piece mostly from an “I need my leadership / partners to understand what I do is important” perspective. But the ideology can similarly be used on other occasions like selling an idea to your peers etc. Ideally you start thinking about this as you try to get the green light to pursue your project instead of attempting to justify it after you’ve already invested your time into it with little to show for it. ...

September 19, 2025