Blink: Don’t Think Without Thinking When It’s About Money

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

Thanks to the discovery of free eBook rentals at the library, I finally read Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell over the weekend. It’s a short book and an easy read, which probably helped create its great popularity.

The book is primarily about the power of your “adaptive unconscious” to make quick and often-accurate decisions. By doing what Gladwell terms “thin-slicing”, the mind extracts the pertinent information out of a ton of available data. An expert on antiques spotting a fake within seconds, a researcher who has seen hundreds of couples being able to predict divorce, a veteran military commander winning a war game against a sophisticated algorithm overwhelmed with data, or someone who has studied facial expressions for years being able to spot hidden emotions. While interesting, I viewed much of this as an expected result of experts being experts.

However, in the end it also exposes how the unconscious can make bad decisions, full of prejudices and tendencies that you aren’t even aware of. Even if you think you are making decisions completely objectively, unless you truly strip out all the other variables then you can’t be sure. Although there is little mention of personal finance topics here, I would say this cautious side is where the book applies to money.

Other books like Your Money and Your Brain and Predictably Irrational have shown that a lot of our instinctual and/or unconscious tendencies towards money actually hurt us financially. We repeatedly find ourselves in speculative bubbles, our mind does quick relative calculations when it shouldn’t and we get used to a better lifestyle too quickly. Being aware of these hidden tendencies can help us become more successful.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


User Generated Content Disclosure: Comments and/or responses are not provided or commissioned by any advertiser. Comments and/or responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any advertiser. It is not any advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Comments

  1. It seems a lot of us upgrade our lifestyle as soon as we start to make more money. I’ve had so many accounting clients over the years promise me they would start saving money once they made more money. But that rarely happened – usually they would just buy bigger homes or a slick new car. I would cringe thinking of all the extra money they could be saving if they had just kept their current lifestyle for a while.

Speak Your Mind

*