All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

Our guts can really mislead us. Sometimes, what we think of as our gut is something else, like an outside influence. If you're going to buy an apartment and it smells of freshly baked bread, you're more likely to want to buy it.

I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.

So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.