![[file-R27RB1MY4QRrRAq3pPF6oo.webp]] # Know Thyself You are not your master, and you don't know yourself. How many times have you brought five hundred books on vacation when you haven't been reading for a while? Your self-perception is skewed and idealized because you want to protect yourself from the implication™️. If you could watch a perfect recording of your typical day, with every minute tracked and analyzed, you'd meet a stranger. Someone who spends two hours more on social media than you'd guess. Someone whose brilliant comebacks in arguments actually sound defensive and repetitive. ![[file-DbinCVQxtsTMiw2Qeskd3n.webp]] [[Made in a Lab/Articles/How you see yourself|How you see yourself]] > [!info ] > # Impact Bias > > We overestimate how long both positive and negative feelings will last, a phenomenon known as 'impact bias'. > That promotion you think will make you permanently happier? That rejection you think will devastate you forever? Your predictions are likely wrong in both cases. Let's borrow a concept from economics: # Revealed preferences Instead of listening to what people say they want, look at what they actually choose when faced with real trade-offs. Your revealed preferences are the choices you make in the real world, not the ones you claim in conversation or imagine in your head. Think of it as the difference between your bookshelf and your actual reading history. Between your aspirational self and your lived reality. When you understand your revealed preferences, you can stop maintaining elaborate fictions about who you are and start working with reality. Maybe you're not actually a morning person - and that's fine. Maybe you don't really enjoy networking events, despite your professional aspirations. Maybe your ideal evening involves rewatching comfort shows instead of catching up on documentaries. This self-knowledge enables more effective change. Instead of setting goals based on an imaginary version of yourself, you can start from who you actually are. Want to read more? Start with ten pages a day instead of planning to read everything ever written by a human in a weekend. Want to exercise more? Consider what you've actually stuck with in the past, not what your idealized self would do. Understanding your revealed preferences doesn't mean giving up on improvement. It means building from a foundation of truth rather than wishful thinking. It means setting achievable goals based on who you really are, not who you imagine yourself to be. After all, you can't get where you're going if you don't know where you're starting from. [[L'integrale dei tuoi giorni]]