eyeLive: Mental Heuristics

A heuristic is a "rule-of-thumb", or advice that helps a human think and act more efficiently by directing thinking in an useful direction. I thought it would be interesting to name some of these heuristics that are age-old wisdom, bordering on cliche, but most are actually helpful.

If you want something done, do it yourself - This is so true because a lot of times I find that when you ask people to do things for you they will either do it or won't. Some people aren't always reliable and we find ourselves working that much harder to fix a mistake that they may have made or just doing it ourselves all together. However, there is a risk of becoming overworked if you try to do everything yourself - we all need other people after all

If you cannot do anything about something, there is no point in worrying about it. - Worrying is very stressful, and in most situations doesn't accomplish anything; making it just wastes energy. Instead of worrying about things, either do something about them or find ways around the problem. One useful idea is to write down your worries on slips of paper, and then put them away in a box. Regularly, once a week or so, you open the box and see what you can do about the worries that are still relevant.

Listen to your intuition, but do not believe it unconditionally - Intuitive or emotional thinking, analogies, "gut feelings" or "flashes of inspiration" can sometimes give fantastic new insights or show problems from a new direction. Unfortunately such thinking isn't always reliable, and quite often completely wrong! Such insights should never be accepted because you admire their beauty or they are intuitive, only because they fit with reality. When we're going on intutive thinking, we should stop and be realistic about the situation as well. Totally basing our feelings on one side of the scale isn't such a wise idea.

I hope these heuristics help you somewhere in life. I could use a couple of them myself. Let's try to put these tips to use people =)

l o v e . l i v e . i n s p i r e . = e l l e . e l l e . e y e .