Rory Gallagher

One of the most surprising pieces of advice to come out of the wellbeing literature perhaps is the importance of developing your curiosity. At the simplest level, this is about actively seeking to ‘take notice’ of the sights, sounds and sensations around you and to savour these moments.

If any structure is to survive, be it behavioural or physical, it needs strong foundations, and to be wisely placed, to take the weight and stresses it will be subject to. As you start to build, its cement and structure will be weak. To succeed, you will need scaffolding to support its initially delicate joints and links. You will need to keep on building the scaffolding too, protecting your structure from the wind and rain as you go.

It’s sometimes remarked that our kids don’t come with manuals – neither do we. It’s a part of the human condition that our minds and behaviours are complex and multifaceted.

Melissa would normally have begun by asking Paul to start filling in forms. But now she was encouraging Paul to think about why he was at the job centre and why finding a job was important to him. He told her about how he wanted to provide for his family. Melissa wasn’t used to having the time or incentive to have these conversations, but found it came very naturally to her.

getting the new tools he needed for the construction work he was looking for. Focusing on completing each of these steps would help ensure that he didn’t feel that the ultimate objective – getting a job – was too distant. They would help him feel as though he was making progress along the way, and this in turn would stoke his motivation

Then, every fortnight, each time Paul met with Melissa, he was encouraged to think about what specifically he was going to do and when. He wrote down each of these tasks and linked them to a moment in his daily routine – like making sure he sent out three applications for jobs on Monday morning after breakfast. This would help create a mental link between moments of the day and week and the things he needed to get on with

The ‘fast’ system operates automatically with no sense of effort or voluntary control. You will be using it when someone asks you ‘What’s the colour of grass?’ or ‘What’s 1 + 1?’ The colour green and the number 2 will pop into your head, whether you want them to or not. The ‘slow’ system, by contrast, requires your active attention. You use it when someone asks you ‘What’s 12 × 19?’, or if you’re walking down the street and you’re asked to try to actively maintain a faster walking pace than you are used to

This wouldn’t be a problem if we had unlimited processing power. But we don’t. We have a limited budget of attention that we can allocate to activities and – as Daniel Kahneman argues – if you try and go beyond that budget, you will fail.4

In other words, we are human beings. We are not the ‘Econs’ described in classical economic textbooks who have the mental agility of Albert Einstein and the willpower of Gandhi.5 We have a finite amount of cognitive ‘bandwidth’,6 and this limits our ability to draw on our slower system all of the time.

A big part of this will involve using your more reflective system today to put in place the behavioural scaffolding around which your future self will act. In doing so, we will be reminding you that the small details matter a lot more than you might expect. To achieve big, you will need to think small.