The balance of my day job, seeing friends, and general travel over the past week has made it a lot harder than I expected to continue my research. However, I’ve found a Potential (pun intended, more on that later) fit for my ‘Build’ section that I’m excited to explore. Onwards!

Academia & legacy views (Research)

Most of my thoughts this week are around Think & Build, but I’ll recap some brief thoughts on my foray into “how can you get educated on development theory”.

First, there appears to be plenty of programs that focus on the core application of development theory, which is education. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, my friend Kishore studied elements of this at Harvard’s Faculty of Education, through the lens of developing tools for teachers and abstract topics (i.e. existential risk).

My initial research shows that there are programs that focus on human development, within the lens of education and other structures, such as:

• Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development (UPenn)

  • This is still quite open-ended and self-directed (given ‘interdisciplinary’) and feels less like a faculty-driven POV (where profs are excited about it and researching it) and more accommodating the margins of what M.Ed students might be interested in (“choose your own adventure”)

• Human Development and Education (Harvard)

  • This seemed the most relevant, speaking both to educational methods and the broader context (i.e. ecological factors, population trends, etc.). Maybe less surprising given that Stein did his PhD here and Robert Kegan built the department over 40 years until 2016…?

The majority of other programs seem to look at it through a few specific lenses:

1. Child Development — I.e. at Oxford University, where multiple factors are considered in the context of a child’s development.

2. Developing Nations — Most of the courses I found when initially searching around ‘development theory’ looked at it quite literally; how to ‘develop’ nations around the world. I.e. London School of Economics.

3. Research (via Psych or Econ) — This is an evolution of both #1 and #2; most psychology programs I saw had a vary degree of focus on ‘development’ as a concept, whereas most programs around ‘developing’ global communities usually necessitated the lens of economics, policy, or both.

I call this section ‘legacy views’ because I think it only exasperates, for the most part, the measurement crisis and how you can only be ‘developing’ someone through the lens of an established practice (psych, econ, etc.). To get to the practical element of development, you can bring the focus of education, but (for the most part) those programs lack the societal context.

This seems like a critical flaw, given the role that communities and interpersonal relationships play in development, and how we might look at someone’s stage of development across numerous areas (health, work, etc.). My qualm can be summarized as the following:

1. Faculty lenses (psych, econ) focus more on policy and research than on how to practically apply their learnings. Being reduced to think tanks and NGOs that lobby governments is a slow and ineffective process.

2. Education lenses are more practical, but can’t work in a system (i.e. econ/policy) that doesn’t support a new way of looking at development. They are good for specific populations (i.e. improving STEM for at-risk youth) but not for systemic change.

I recognize these are sweeping accusations that can likely be refuted by advocates from either camp, as I’ve done (very) minimal research on the academic space for this... However, I stand behind my hypothesis: The majority of the folks interested in development theory (with wellbeing as a consequence) are intellectuals and not builders, and that’s hindering what proper investment in this space can accomplish.

Don’t blow your brains decision-making out (Think)

As I continue to ruminate on my qualitative interviews, I have come to some new conclusions about the core challenges that we face with wellbeing. First, note some of the following from my conclusions:

• People are utilitarian in their pursuit of needs — They will prioritize the ones that they value more, often treating it as a zero sum game (focus less on other areas).

• People can typically identify their major needs — Most of my subjects could tell when one part of their life was suboptimal, and knew how to course correct it.

• People are social in their decisions on needs — While the subjects felt the most aligned when acting from internal values, they often had to make decisions from their social group (family, intimate partner, etc.) with the concept of reciprocation (“it’ll balance out later”).

A major hypothesis that stemmed from the above is the idea of ‘zero sum needs’ and how we, as humans, make our decisions. There is plenty of research on the concept of cognitive load — if you keep more information in your head, it’s hard to make deliberate decisions about what to do.

In the above scenarios, the subjects are quite competent with choosing a focus area (i.e. physical health). It requires a lot more decision-making power to then decide how to operationalize their intention; i.e. implement habits and routines that support its development. With physical health, this might be:

1. Going to the gym X times per week — When do you go, how do you get there, what do you do there, etc.

2. Eating healthy — What do you eat, how much does it cost, how do you obtain it, etc.

There are plenty of point solutions to the above — HelloFresh for meal choices, MyFitnessPal for diet, Zero for fasting, etc. The problem is configuring all these apps to work properly for you, and to feed into your broader intention. In the final results from my survey, 61% of respondents either were trying health apps but hadn’t found a fit, or were not convinced of their value (“this doesn’t work for me”).

How does this complicate the idea of cognitive load? Well, we know that everyone has a different weighting to their needs. Some may value physical health more than others. However, everyone has some adherence to Maslow’s Theory of Needs — it’s highly unlikely that you give 0% to relationships, or mental health, income/work, etc.

Therefore, it makes sense that you’d have multiple intentions at any given time. However, we’ve seen above the problems with addressing one intention, let alone multiple intentions. I believe this is why we see intentions as zero sum — we don’t have the cognitive energy to pursue two goals in parallel, without taking that energy from another goal.

This makes sense, as your weighting towards your needs will change over time, BUT does this reality:

1. Make the most use of your mental capacity & effort

2. Lead to sustained gains in a given area?

I.e. you give 25% equally between physical health, mental health, your intimate relationship, and your work. If you reduce physical health to 5% after 1 week (give 20% to work, now at 45%), will you see the gains you need to meet your intention of physical health? Or do you accept “you can’t win them all” and resolve to revisit it later? Do we only make gains when a need persists in its domination of our effort allocation?

To take it a step further, how do our relationships play into this? Do you give 20% to physical health but it ramps to 50% when your friend makes a comment about the weight you’ve gained? And then to 60% when you see an Instagram photo from an influencer who you admire, and whose body you want?

I can’t say for certain how often our needs fluctuate, and what plays into the accomplishing of a given intention. However, I think - despite my subjects’ insistence that their only blockers were internal - that it’s native to say that our society & relationships have low impact on our intentions / needs, and that ‘pure, individual willpower’ is the only solution.

In working with a confidential data set, I found that 78% of people who had a health app installed (i.e. MyFitnessPal, Zero, etc.) did not have a mental health app installed (Calm, Headspace, etc.). This furthers the narrative: it’s very hard to pursue multiple intentions at once.

As a final thought to ‘Think’, I believe a lot of these apps are VERY powerful and useful, but not in isolation. The problem is that they’re all going for point solutions and targeting audiences who have some varying degree of high prioritization (let’s say 60-100%) on their target area (i.e. physical health). The vast majority who don’t have this (i.e. <60%) or shift focus over time will either fail to activate as a paying user, or cancel their subscription in the future. As a rough stat, Headspace has 3.3 million paying users out of 70 million downloads (4.7%). B2C apps expect to convert paying users at 2-5%. Granted, a user can ‘activate’ without paying for a product, but it shows that there’s a massive TAM not being addressed.

What has the most Potential? (Build)

Thanks to my exec coach, Daniel, I was introduced to Welf, the founder of Potential App. At a glance, it looks like a more powerful habit tracking app, and that is true, but Welf has a prolific background:

• Has gone deep on mindfulness for several years - blogs at Monastic

• Previously joined the Daylight team to tackle focus (from hardware POV)

• Worked with Apple on iOS 15, Humane, a concept designed to improve intentionality for iOS users

We first chatted for over an hour and have been talking a couple times per week since. I’m quite aligned with Welf’s longer term vision on intentionality and find a lot of parallels to my research to date. I’m currently exploring ways that we can collaborate and might end my EuroTour with some in-person jamming.

I would highly recommend checking out Potential App and please reach out if you’ve had any exposure to habit tracking apps, or thoughts on the combination of point solutions (Headspace, Apple Health, etc.) that have worked for you. More on this section soon!