Posts

November 15, 2011

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5:59 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Try to Make Bricks Without Clay

If this week’s lesson sounds a bit repetitive, it is meant to, not only because it touches on so many of the poor thought habits that Holmes singles out in his attempts to craft Watson into an abler logician, but also because it is the last–for now, at least–of the “Lessons from Sherlock Holmes” series, [...]

November 08, 2011

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12:31 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Preconceptions and the Blunting of Imagination

Sometimes, the impossible takes place: Sherlock Holmes makes a mistake. Yes, it happens. The master detective falls prey to some of the very errors he urges us to avoid. If even he falters, what chance do we mere mortals have? Well, for one, we can examine those moments when Holmes does go wrong and see [...]

November 01, 2011

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10:20 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Why Most of Us Wouldn’t Be Able to Tell That Watson Fought in Afghanistan

I remember well my amazement when I heard my first ever demonstration of Holmes’s observational and deductional prowess in A Study in Scarlet. We had just settled in, as we did every Sunday night, to listen to the evening’s reading entertainment. Earlier in the week, we had finished The Count of Monte Cristo–after a harrowing [...]

October 18, 2011

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12:42 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking

I often find myself walking into the kitchen (or the living room or bedroom or wherever), unable to recall why I was going there in the first place. What I do in those cases is retrace my steps, until I am back to where I began my trip. And more often than not, the location [...]

October 11, 2011

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2:32 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Judge a Man by His Face

How do we perceive someone we’ve only just met? How to we judge him, assign him to some sort of category in our mind, explain to ourselves what he is and what he is likely to be? In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Dr. Watson demonstrates an approach that we are all too likely [...]

October 04, 2011

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12:45 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them

When we look around us, what is it that we see? Do we see things as they are, or do we at once, without thinking, begin to interpret? Take the simple example of a wine glass. All it is is a transparent object that holds a liquid–which we know by experience should be wine. But [...]

September 27, 2011

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7:02 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide

When we make a decision, we are, in fact, deciding. It’s plain common sense. The definition of a decision. A tautology if ever there was one. Right? Actually, wrong. While it may indeed seem a commonsensical tautology, the truth is that we often decide long before we’re making a decision: our preconceptions, biases, behavioral habits [...]

September 20, 2011

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5:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of knowledge is essential.

Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes urged us to maintain a crisp and clean brain attic: out with the useless junk; in with meticulously organized boxes that are uncluttered by useless paraphernalia. But how exactly do you determine what should be in, and what, out? As it turns out, Holmes’s definition of relevance is actually [...]

September 16, 2011

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5:17 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought

Holmes often faults the hapless Watson–and many others who come under his exacting gaze–for a failure to use proper logic. But his admonishments often remain general, noting an overall failure to demonstrate the requisite logical finesse without necessarily taking the time to point out where exactly the reasoner went wrong. After all, Holmes has more [...]

September 13, 2011

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6:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion

I’d like to continue today with the tale of the “Copper Beeches” that we left off last time. The exchange between Holmes and Watson on the nature of country houses does not end with the initial dialogue. Instead, it moves forward in as interesting a philosophical vein as it was begun. Except, from individual perception [...]

September 09, 2011

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3:44 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer

Do we all experience the world in the same way? Is the same event actually the same event when viewed from the vantage point of each observer, each participant, each accidental onlooker? I’m not trying here to get at the more philosophical issues that one can raise, quite naturally, in response (is the red you [...]

September 06, 2011

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12:51 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much

Confidence in ourselves and in our skills allows us to push our limits, achieve more than we otherwise would, try even in those borderline cases where a less confident person would bow out. But is there such a thing as being too confident, a flip side to this driver of success? Absolutely. It’s called overconfidence: [...]

September 02, 2011

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5:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination

It’s easy to see Sherlock Holmes as a hard, cold reasoning machine: the epitome of calculating logic. And it’s true. In many ways, the ideal Holmes is almost a precursor to the computer, taking in countless data points as a matter of course, analyzing them with startling precision, and spitting out a solution. But Holmes [...]

August 30, 2011

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6:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing

Details are important, often crucial. But focus exclusively on the details, without taking a step back, and you run the risk of getting lost in minutiae – and more likely than not, of missing any actual importance the details might contain. In other words, don’t forget the old proverb, “Don’t miss the forest for the [...]

August 26, 2011

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5:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide

Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes deals with learning to cull and to cultivate knowledge in such a way that your decision process will be optimized for the question at hand, and not get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae – a lesson that is all too relevant in the age of the internet, when we have [...]

August 23, 2011

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7:00 PM | Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There

Today’s lesson from Sherlock Holmes is, in a sense, the most difficult to apply on a regular basis: pay attention to what isn’t there, not just what is. Absence is just as important and just as telling as presence. The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime: what doesn’t happen matters as much as [...]

August 19, 2011

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8:20 PM | Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions

Sherlock Holmes isn’t what you’d call a traditional psychologist. In fact, he isn’t even real (despite the letters that to this day arrive at 221B Baker Street). But his insights into the human mind do more to teach us about how we do think and how we should think than many a more conventional source. [...]