2023 NJC H1 General Paper Prelim P2 Insert

2 © National Junior College 2023 David Robson and David Brooks write about the mimicking of routines and rituals of successful people. . 1 Where would the self-help and business media be without the secret habits o f highly successful people? Almost every week there is a new article outlining a h igh-flying individual’s behaviours – with the implied promise that using the same techniques could deliver us fame and fortune, too. Arianna Huffington, the CEO of Thrive Global, prioritises sleep in the name of productivity, including a bedtime ritual in which she turns off all mobile devices and “escorts them out of [her] bedroom ”. Other inspirational figures are more idiosyncratic in their habits. Bill Gates was very particular in his choice of notebook: it had to be a yellow legal pad. Fu rther back in history, Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans for each cup, which h e used to power his composing. 5 2 Why do successful people follow such eccentrically specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives? The an swer lies in a powerful psychological process called ‘superstitious learning’. The brain is constantly looking for associations between two events. While it is mostly correct, it sometim es mistakes coincidence for causality – leading us to attribute success to something as arbitrary as the colour of our notebook or the number of beans in our b rew, rather than our own talent or hard work. And when we hear of other ’s triumphs, we often end up copying their habits, too, including the arbitrary rituals that they had acquired through superstitious learning. 10 15 3 This is not to say the resulting habits are completely devoid of benefits. By giving us a sense of self-determination, the adoption of rituals – including the completely random behaviours that we have learnt ourselves or borrowed from those we admire – can help us to overcome anxiety, and may even bring about a noticeable boost in performance. It offers psychological benefits that logic and science cannot always provide: namely, a sense of control and a sense of meaning. We often rely on such rituals when we are anxious or want to perform well, and though the y may not directly have their intended magical effects, these rituals produce an illusion of control and enhance self-confidence, which in turn can improve our perf ormance and thus, indirectly affect our fate. 20 25 4 “Superstition is a kind of maladaptive behaviour that arises from what is n ormally a very good thing – the ability of the brain to predict, ” says Elena Daprati, a neuroscientist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. In a 2019 paper, her team showed that individual differences in implicit learning – the brain ’s ability to non- consciously pick up patterns – can explain why some people are more likely to form superstitious habits than others. In everyday life, this associative lea