Upstream

parenting is a rare exception where upstream thinking comes naturally. Almost everything we do as parents is with an eye toward our kids’ future happiness and health:

Maybe we should train our leaders how to conduct better interviews, so that the conversations don’t degenerate into small talk. (Small talk leads us to favor “likable” candidates—in other words, candidates who are just like us.)

“The law is just a set of rules based on inputs from power sources,” said Iton. “If you want to change the rules, you’ve got to change the power inputs so that the outcome will be different.”

Anger could be a destructive force or a constructive one, he stressed, and we’re free to choose.

For teenage alcohol abuse, a protective factor is being involved in formal sports—it eats up a teen’s time and provides a source of natural highs.

Nothing is easy. The world is complex and there are no quick fixes. But if I can learn to uncross my arms and extend my hands, I can be someone who eases suffering rather than ignores it.

When we can foresee a problem, we have more maneuvering room to fix it. That’s why a key question bearing on upstream efforts is: How can you get early warning of the problem you’re trying to solve?

Data warns us of a problem we wouldn’t have seen otherwise—

One key factor is the prevalence of false positives: warnings that incorrectly signal trouble.

When everything is cause for alarm, nothing is cause for alarm.

Will the warning give us enough time to act effectively? (If not, why bother?) What rate of false positives can we expect?

we’d rather err on the side of too many false positives. The cost of missing those warning signals is simply too high.

with upstream efforts, success is not always self-evident.

we can’t apprehend success directly, and we are forced to rely on approximations—quicker, simpler measures that we hope will correlate with long-term success.

when measures become the mission. This is the most destructive form of ghost victory, because it’s possible to ace your measures while undermining your mission.

When people are rewarded for achieving a certain number, or punished for missing it, they will cheat.

people will do anything that’s legal without the slightest remorse—even if it grossly violates the spirit of the mission—and they will find ways to look more favorably upon what’s illegal.

if you use a quantity-based measure, quality will often suffer.

What else might explain that success, other than our own efforts, and are we tracking those factors?

If someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort possible, what would they do?