You wake up. You pick up your phone and there are a hundred notifications waiting — news, messages, email, whatever happened online overnight. Where do you even start? You open the closet and there's nothing to wear despite forty things hanging there. Then breakfast, then the route to work, then an opinion in a meeting, then lunch. By evening your head hurts.
We have more options available to us than any generation in history. More options has not made us happier. It's made us tired.
A razor is a thinking tool that cuts away what doesn't matter so you're left holding only what does. The name comes from shaving — you're stripping down to a clean surface.
What follows are ten of them. For each one: why it exists, what the research actually says, and what you can do about it starting tomorrow.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Someone steps on your foot on the train. Did they do that on purpose? A colleague doesn't send the file they promised. Am I being ignored? A friend reads your message and doesn't reply. Are they angry with me?
We read malice into behavior constantly. And almost always, the person was clumsy, or uninformed, or busy. The train was crowded and they lost their balance. Your colleague forgot. Your friend was genuinely slammed.
Psychologists call the underlying bias the fundamental attribution error: when explaining other people's behavior we over-weight their character and under-weight their situation. When explaining our own, we do the reverse — we were late because of traffic; they were late because they're disorganized.
Worth knowing that this bias is culturally variable. It's strongest in individualistic Western samples and considerably weaker in East Asian ones, where situational explanation comes more naturally. It isn't a universal law of cognition.
There's a companion effect: the spotlight effect, documented by Thomas Gilovich, where we substantially overestimate how much other people notice us. Which is why a small slight feels targeted. Most people are absorbed in their own day and are not thinking about you at all.
What to do
When you first observe something that stings, run the default: they were probably careless, uninformed, or busy. Before judging, ask the actual question — hey, what happened with the file? — which resolves most of these in one exchange. And consider what explanation you'd want extended to you when you make the same mistake.
"Given two rooms, choose the one where you're the least impressive person in it."
Two rooms. In the first, you know more than everyone — you'll talk a lot and feel good. In the second, everyone is sharper and more experienced than you and you'll feel like a beginner. Which do you pick?
Most people pick the first. This razor says pick the second, then talk less and listen harder.